Satan, Britney Spears Top Paris Hilton In OSS References

An anonymous reader writes "Krugle, a software search company, had some time on its hands — it compared frequency of mentions in open source code of presidential candidates, Beelzebub and yes, Britney Spears." I wish they'd link to a nice long list of the other terms this revealed — there are probably a lot of subtler funny references and asides.

Abbreviation:

Would 'BS' count as a reference to Ms. Spears? Just asking.

Am I missing something here?

I've never included random crap like that in my code... even in college when I was pulling all nighters. Why on earth would I want to have to reference the ParisHilton class? and how would that be helpful to other developers? This is silliness.

Re:Am I missing something here?

That class will show its privates to just about anyone who asks!

Re:Am I missing something here?

The problem is that the class has to use its inheritance to get what it wants.

Re:Am I missing something here?

Satan wasn't born in the USA and is thus ineligible.

Re:Am I missing something here?

I've never included random crap like that in my code... even in college when I was pulling all nighters. Why on earth would I want to have to reference the ParisHilton class? and how would that be helpful to other developers? This is silliness.

I was thinking the same thing.

But, I guess when some people are coding they like to inject a little bit of silliness or vent their anger.

I once worked on a project where we were explicitly told our comments couldn't have profanity or other non-PC things in them. Apparently, one time during a customer-required code walkthrough, the developer had littered their code with all sorts of insulting things about the customers and their requirements out of frustration with tight timelines and bad specs. It caused quite a stir. Thereafter, they made sure all developers understood that such things would not be tolerated.

Me, I just couldn't fathom why I'd want to waste time putting vitriol into my code and comments. I need the comments to explain to me what I'm doing and why so that 2 months from now I know what I'd been trying to do.

However, having maintained a few legacy code-bases in my day, you'd be astonished what people actually do put into comments. I've seen some downright bizarre things, ranging from slagging the product to slagging people. Heck, I saw a haiku once, and it actually explained the function quite well.

I suspect a lot of OSS coders have a different view about what to put into their code and have lots of time on their hands to do it in.

Cheers

Re:Am I missing something here?

In one of my early programming classes my professor had a minimum length for hard copy code to be turned in. Let's just say my code worked, but my hard copy was too short. Rather than muck my code with unneeded calls and the like I did a lengthy comment about how I believed CS finding the most direct solution to problems even at the risk of upsetting the client.

The code got an A with the added comment from the Prof that the minimum hard copy length requirement for first years would be going away after this.

Re:Am I missing something here?

honestly though... I'm a big fan of "//Magic happens here"

Re:in code, or in comments?

Well, I didn't see this first-hand, but I heard that one of my cow-orkers wrote some interesting COBOL code during his divorce. He had this line of code:

Perform Beat-my-wife Until She-Screams.

Sadly, I never got to work on any of his code before it was cleaned up.

Re:Am I missing something here?

Might give that a shot, heres what had to be removed from mozilla before they opened the source
http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html [jwz.org]

Re:Am I missing something here?

Why on earth would I want to have to reference the ParisHilton class? and how would that be helpful to other developers? This is silliness.

I think the reason why so many open source projects have odd comments or funny comments is that its being made by people who aren't being paid and don't have a manager breathing down their necks so they'll use whatever they'd like at the time. Personally I think comments are the best part of open source code.

My fav so far:

/* DRUNK. FIX LATER */

Source and some more amusing comments. [everything2.com]

Re:Am I missing something here?

If you do a search on Krugle, you'll find that most of the references are in database files, not code. e.g. Public figures tend to show up in example data files. There were quite a few Clinton jokes back in the day, so Hillary shows up in a number of files. Paris Hilton is a common "adult" keyword, so you'll notice .htaccess files restricting it.

Here are a few examples:

http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Hillary%20Clinton [krugle.org]
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Paris%20Hilton [krugle.org]
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Barack%20Obama [krugle.org]
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Tooth%20fairy [krugle.org]

Even if you search for just code files, you sometimes find data inlined into a unit test:

http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Tooth%20fairy&lang=java [krugle.org]
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Hillary%20Clinton&lang=java [krugle.org]
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Paris%20Hilton&lang=java [krugle.org]

So there you go. A whole lot of non-news. :-)

Re:Am I missing something here?

Often, such things come from frustration or from humor starvation. One time, in a programming competition during college, we were required to do our work in Visual Studio. We implemented a sort routine and knew not to call it sort(), so we called it mysort(), which also turned out to be taken by MS. Out of frustration with the clock counting down, I gave it a name that I knew would not have any conflicts: myfuckingsort().

I figured I was in the clear, because the competition administrators and judges had told us that they do not read the code, they just run the program and check for correct output. However, they did quietly talk to us after we received our prize for winning the competition. Apparently, while they don't read the code as part of the competition, they do skim it out of curiosity sometimes.

For the remainder of my C.S. career, I was notorious for having invented the by-then-shortened "fucksort" routine. It still comes up in conversation from time to time.

Re:Am I missing something here?

<boring nostalgic story>
I once wanted to name an module in some fortran code 'data', but, of course, that's a protected word, so I called it 'brentSpiner' instead. I don't think my supervisor watched star trek though, so he didn't really get the joke.
</boring nostalgic story>

Re:Am I missing something here?

$this = "madness";

if ($this eq "madness")
{
          $this = "sparta!!!! >(";
}

*snicker*

A friend of mine got a call a few days ago from an old job of his doing some Access application development (*pukes*). Apparently they didn't appreciate the fact that the code was littered with references to the Spanish Inquisition, Spam, Grail Shaped Beacons, and so on.

Re:*snicker*

What did they expect to accomplish by calling to scold a former employee?

Re:*snicker*

Buy him a bumper sticker: "I wish I was coding Python."

Meaningful Comments

My Favorite comment came from the DEC PDP-11 Fortran compiler. After searching extensively for a bug in our code, we managed to get the compiler source, and at the location where our code imploded, the compiler author had inserted the comment,

"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

Re:Meaningful Comments

I rather like this one that I saw [debian.org] at the weekend. Sounds like an unpleasant way to go.

Satan I can understand ...

Satan I can understand (BSD Devil, references to the Beast from Redmond, Chipzilla, etc), but Britney Speares? That's EVIL!

Is the summary wrong or is the article misleading?

The summary suggests that they measured the frequency of mentions of these terms in the source code - the article seems to suggest that they measured the terms searched for using the Krugle search engine. The former would be interesting, the latter would not.

Amusing anagrams

Paris Hilton - Hail, it's porn!

Britney Spears - Prissy bra teen

Binks variable...

My Java library path variable is called binks.

It's the place I store all my jarjars.

(Ooo, thats going to cost me! Don't you just love the smell of karma burning in the morning...)

Well, good!

There is a large stack of evidence showing that warning labels don't work, and may in fact inspire more people to try the thing being warned against.

More developers is a good thing.