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Comment by VeejayRampay | Hacker News Reader

A quick observation from an outsider: The article goes into a lot of depth, seems highly technical, well crafted and researched but the whole "pre-poop your pants" thing just ruins all that and makes it looks childish. I understand that not everything about development has to be serious, but I also think that aligning form and content is the surest way to make sure your message comes across.

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I'll reuse my reply on /r/rust to defend the naming:

> I like the naming and feeling of "Pre-Pooping Your Pants" pattern. We are doing the intentional leak only to be (hopefully) collected later, which may not happen but it still remains memory-safe even in that case. Still this is not very desirable and the name clearly indicates so.

A term for code written in an undesirable way to tie you over in the short-term is a "hack".

Not all hacks are bad. But, if I see "// this is a hack to..." or "# this is a hack to..." or similar in code, that is a signal to me that the developer (1) either didn't have time to perform the right thing but could have with more time (within their lifetime), or (2) could not feasibly perform the right thing under constraints given (within their lifetime).

Over the past ~8 years, "hack"'s use has switched back to a much more positive sense- possibly because of HN, or possibly because people read Eric Raymond http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html, but "hack" != "hacker". The negative sense is still used and understood by most developers, and it comes from two things: "HACK... HACK... HACK...", like the sound of an ax attempting to chop down a tree (brute force), and the other definition of a hack not used as much these days, which is "work for hire especially with mediocre professional standards".

I think we should at least consider PPYP to be a subclass of "hack", or perhaps just use the word "hack" instead of PPYP.

kludge is a better term for an undesirable short-term fix. hack implies clever or elegant.

I think Pre-Poop Your Pants is a really clever way to package the core idea. I agree that the article is well crafted, and I don't think it's childish to talk about poop in this context.

I guess it's a personal thing. I don't know much about Rust, but the title explained the severity of the problem pretty good right away.

I'm hoping this design pattern name catch on. PPYP design pattern.

Sometime programming can be boring and then you come across PPYP and it makes it fun again.

First it was dry and boring, and then someone mentioned "poop" and then the same subject was hilarious! I don't get it...

It's not an "official" article, just a blog post by a contributor. Informal is okay IMO.

I couldn't agree more. the article is well written, but the title puts me off a lot.

How am I going to show this to my boss, and have him take it seriously with such an infantile title?

Why would you want to show it to your boss?

I tend to keep him updated with rust news, so that when the day comes, I've laid enough groundwork to be able to do something in it without having to explain what it is and why etc.

And part of that is showing flaws, and how they're resolved/worked around and so on.

You have the right to your own feelings, and I agree that the title may be off putting. The audience for the article is rust core contributors and rust fans, and they're a very informal bunch. If rusters are like similar communities I know, talking about poop makes a blog post more likely to spread.

EDIT: I do not want to argue with Dewey2, so I'm putting this here: the women in the rust community that feel uncomfortable when they are addressed as "guys" have every right to feel that way, and I commend the rust community on making that stand.

There's nothing to suggest all other rust devs like this way of presenting it. I don't. I agree it's off-putting even if the issue itself is interesting.

> How am I going to show this to my boss, and have him take it seriously with such an infantile title?

Probably the same way you would explain to your boss what KISS principle means or what WTF-metric for source code is :)

I don't know the wtf metric, but whatever it is it's not about "poop". So I'm going to say it's different.

It's an old joke, but it has a bit of wisdom.

Illustration: https://davidlongstreet.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/wtfm.jpg...

First Ruby, then JS, now Rust.

What is your point?

I guess the parent means something that has to do with the community being a bit hipster / infantile? Only guessing though.

The entire infantile humour / brogrammer / hipster / drama phenomenon. It started in Ruby (_why, Zed Shaw, GitHub, etc) then moved into JS as Node and CoffeeScript became popular with Rails users, now it's in Rust (again via Ruby).

I don't think it's always the same people or that it has anything to do with Ruby itself, it just seems like there's a certain culture that first grew in the Ruby / Rails community.

FWIW I actually thought the title detracted from the otherwise excellent contents of the post.

This post is the first infantile thing in this vein I can remember seeing related to Rust, and, as far as I know, the author has no connection to the Ruby community you describe, they're just choosing poor titles of their own accord (I agree with Steve that the title detracts).

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