Developers have their own, cynical kind of humour. Consider, for instance, Geek and Poke’s view on how to insult a developer.
But there’s a better humour than posting stuff on a website. There are source code comments. Because you can giggle now, write your witty remark, and wait for your coworkers to discover your sense of humour only 3-4 years later (when you’re long gone, working in another project, department, or company). Isn’t that the ultimate way to express cynicism?
For instance, I once encountered this fat piece of Javadoc in a previous employer’s legacy source code:
/** * NEVER EVER TOUCH THIS METHOD OR EVERYTHING * WILL EXPLODE!!!!! */
But the bug was in that method! A monster with around 500 lines and 80 characters of indentation! So I went and first fixed the Javadoc:
/** * NEVER EVER TOUCH THIS METHOD OR EVERYTHING * WILL EXPLODE!!!!! * ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ * Chicken! */
If you have a couple of spare minutes (or hours) to read up other witty and cynical comments, dive into this awesome Stack Overflow question featuring the top 549 pieces of comment in code. An extract by Steve Weet.
I once came up with what I thought was an elegant solution to a particularly sticky problem, in retrospect it was a bit of a mind-bender and made some heavy use of macro programmimg. Years later I found this comment from a maintenance programmer
/* The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small Macro. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy the IT department. Steve Weet - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as some would have it, a slacker. And they would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of Chelsea FC, or doing spectrographic analyses of macros. "Have some sense of proportion!" they would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show them. And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from one macro, and into the other end he plugged the IT department: so that when he turned it on they saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and theirselves in relation to it. To Steve Weet's horror, the shock completely annihilated their brains; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. */
