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The obvious response to this is that there are two kinds of easter eggs. The good kind doesn't do something one way a million times and then suddenly produce a
by BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
The obvious response to this is that there are two kinds of easter eggs.
The good kind doesn't do something one way a million times and then suddenly produce a different result given the same input for no good reason like your example date/time shenanigans.
Unpredictable behavior is called not being dependable. Not being dependable is called untrustworthy. Software should always strive to be predictable, dependable, and trustworthy.
But there have also been plenty of fun easter eggs in computing history that didn't needlessly make the software less predictable. We don't need to also throw out the baby.
- throwaway37585 8y agoI think it depends on the context. In video games, easter eggs are mostly fine. In utilities and tools, easter eggs are a potential source of harmful behavior and security issues.
- wink 8y agoAlso you can do it in a non-destructive, non-random way. Take `apt` as an example. The easter egg is running it with an undocumented flag. The "error case" is the same as mistyping a command. Sure, you could argue the return code is 0 when it should be != 0 but I'd argue a) if you're using the wrong flags it's your fault and b) if you'd hit --help by chance it would also return 0.