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Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code
- notional 6y ago> so we need to add yet more ugliness in the form of assembler to an app which is already hardly a paragon of pulchritude Throwing some serious vocab shade in these comments, love it.
- floatingatoll 6y agoIt's for the alliterativeness.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tibbydudeza 6y agoOne of the ugly hacks you do in SAP to make it work is reading/changing variables and structures inside the SAP standard code because there is no API exposing them. It is blessed officially as doing a "dirty" assign.
- xmprt 6y ago> there is no API exposing them. If there's no API exposing them but there's a way to make use of the internals with a dirty assign then sounds like the internals are now part of the API.
- Mandatum 6y agoCorrect. Same reason I learned a bunch of German words writing against supposedly English-dev'd and platform agnostic abstractions. It's a fucking mess, but boy do they print money.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoIt is a feature of their language but you are on your own as a customer when an upgrade breaks the internals.
- cybert00th 6y agoPulchritude!? Boy, I had to look that one up!
- chapium 6y agoLooking it up, I still have no idea what it means. The best I can gather is its beautifully wholesome. Other sources say beauty, but it seems like such a specific word for a form of beauty.
- FroshKiller 6y agoIt means physical beauty, like an attractive appearance.
- Izkata 6y agoWeird, I'd've guessed the opposite - the word looks as though it could've been related to "putrid".
- throwawgler87 6y agoUnderstandable. The meaning is easy to grasp intuitively if you've studied Latin for a semester or two and happen to know the word "pulchra." If not, I'm having trouble thinking of any cognates in English that are in any kind of common parlance.
- EasyTiger_ 6y agoHave never come across the word before either. Makes you think - did the person say the word to convey some kind of meaning? Or to sound super-smart to their peers?
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoKnowing developers who choose to write above an 8th grade reading level for no reason... they used that word to feel superior and make everyone who reads it feel stupid.
- Alopis 6y agoMy favorite part is > If you add some obscure code such as below, to this or any other app, even if it has only the teeniest chance of being less blindingly obvious to someone else than it is to you at the time of writing, please please please add a fing comment. This rings as true now as it did then and its my favorite comment so far out of this whole leak. I've reached a point where my comments are there to remind myself why I did a thing, because more often than not I'm the poor bastard who's stuck fixing what past me did, and past me was either a sadistic asshole or a blithering idiot.
- prox 6y agoI watched Adam13531 on Twitch a lot, and the way he comments is very extensive, but complete. Ever since I started doing the same. Quite helpful to yourself.
- joemazerino 6y agoMicrosoft internal shade. Juicy!
- cm2187 6y agoLecturing on keyboard shortcuts when windows media player is the only video player in the world not using the space bar as a shortcut for play/pause.
- alphakappa 6y agoNeither does YouTube, likely the most popular video playing entity today, respect the spacebar on iOS.
- dijit 6y agoI think you’re mistaken, YouTube (in all the forms I use it with a keyboard at least) supports spacebar as a pause key. Your browser might try to pop you down half a page if the thing that is selected or highlighted on the page is not the video player itself though. But it works 100% of the time in fullscreen.
- dkdk8283 6y agoYoutube itself changed the space bar behavior from context specific (pause if player in focus, scroll of comment in focus) but they rolled that back so space is always pause. I like the context sensitive behavior and wrote a grease mo key script to restore it.
- exikyut 6y agoYouTube's keyboard handling is Insanely Intuitive™, I must absolutely agree. Usefully, the up/down keys don't change the volume unless the player is also focused. What's incredibly sad is that j/k/l were agreed upon to rewind/pause/forward the video, and these generally work unless you're in a textbox... but dedicated keys were not similarly approved to control the volume. -- My current winner for Absolutely Favorite Piece Of YouTube-Related Keyboard Functionality©®℠ is... YouTube Music (https://music.youtube.com/ https://music.youtube.com/)... which uses a different set of fundamental keyboard shortcuts to YouTube. [;]=pause, [j]=next, [k]=prev, [l]=forward, [h]=rewind. There are two disasters here. The first is that <YouTube/pause> == <YouTube Music/rewind to beginning>. "Nooooo! I was 2 hours?? and how many seconds??? into this video... >.<". Naturally, in this situation, I ReWoUnD ThE ViDeO To ThE BeGiNnInG MySeLf, so YouTube's "last play position" indicator can't help me here. YAYYY. The second disaster is that it's obvious a Vim user clearly argued successfully for Music to use Vi-style hjkl, but both the key choices and how they are presented in the UI could not be less intuitive, regardless of whether the user also uses Vim or not. I copied above exactly how the UI (in the [?] popup) lists the sequence. Specifically, the whole thing is shifted left by 1 position, wrapping [h] around to the right. Fixing that to show the sequence how a Vim user would expect, it looks like: [h]=rewind, [j]=next, [k]=prev, [l]=forward. But then, any Vim user is going to be utterly confused by this sequence, not only because of the mild readjustment of assigning up/down to prev/next and left/right to seeking - but because Vim "up" [j] is assigned to "next", and Vim "down" [k] is assigned to "prev". Upside down playlist much?!?! I no longer use YouTube Music, solely because of the number of long videos I have rewound and lost my position in. I'm also incidentally trying to passively commit hjkl to memory (you know, the whole spaced repetition thing), and all the above was just too confusing.
- chris_wot 6y agoThis is why I love open source. In LibreOffice, cruft like this is often removed due to the embarrassment factor.
- sn_master 6y agoIt was removed from Microsoft code too. This is an old snapshot of the code, almost two decades old. Since the 2002 TWC initiative, anything from easter eggs to things like that are all very strongly banned, and actively get removed as they're discovered.
- skee0083 6y agoNot surprising. No fun is allowed anywhere anymore. just dull flat interfaces with grey and black colors. people can say what they want about windows xp and vista but they had soul. todays OSes are souless. Looking at you windows 10..
- dmix 6y agoLooking at you Reddit...
- speedgoose 6y agoYou can configure the colours in Windows 10 to make it look fun and childish.
- sterlind 6y agoI dunno. I certainly keep my comments family-friendly and clear, but these comments resemble my own in their dry wit. I also use emojis as icons in internal tools, since they don't require finding images, but this had the side effect of people reporting "sad cat" errors and the like.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoWhat is TWC?
- kamel3d 6y agoYouTuber Barnacules, use to work for Microsoft and he did tell a story on his live stream about ridiculous comments MS developers use to put in their code, I am sure they still do
- jackewiehose 6y agoThe bug here is in media player to listen on key-up events. Mouse-button-up makes sense because the user can move the mouse to cancel the click. But key events should be on key-down and that's how it is done most of the time. So if you use key-up you run into these problems.
- Waterluvian 6y ago> But key events should be on key-down Why? I like how keyup is less ambiguous: it avoids the question “what do I do if the user is holding the key down?” I also like being able to hold the key down to cue up a command and then at the right time, pull my hand away to execute crisply. For video editing mainly. I’m not saying keyup is the only answer. Just that there isn’t one obvious answer.
- jackewiehose 6y ago> Why? Because of the reported bug in this example (which I also encountered quite often): - user hits ESCAPE - my window gets key-down/ESCAPE and closes itself - your window (which happens to be the next in the focus-order) gets key-up/ESCAPE and closes itself > I also like being able to hold the key down to cue up a command and then at the right time, pull my hand away to execute crisply Ok, but if your window wants to support this behavior (which is not very common) you have to watch for key-up AND key-down like the bug-report suggests.
- cortesoft 6y agoWhat if the OS only sent key-up events to a window if it also received the corresponding key-down event?
- jackewiehose 6y agoThen we wouldn't have this conversation.
- dmurray 6y ago
- sam_goody 6y agoOT: There's an thread on SO with a collection of awesome comments in code. Well worth a read. If not for the insight, than for the chuckle: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment-in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered https://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-...
- Sembiance 6y agoAhh, stack overflow. Hugely popular thread with a lot of engagement? Lets lock it. Wouldn’t want to encourage behavior that doesn’t match our narrow minded “vision” for the site. Still though, an improvement over the early years where they just outright deleted countless pages with countless contributions. In the end it’s their site and they can run it however they want, but it’s sad to see such massive potential squandered through a policy promoting deletionism. Hindsight is 20/20 though and it’s not like I’ve gone and coded a better one, so I should probably just delete this comment and move on.
- martin_a 6y agoPleae be nice to the 2374568234th user that could not manage to read any manual or just google for his error message before opening a new question!
- httpsterio 6y agoIt's not always that simple. Half of the time when I run into errors, there's no one solution that either works or 100% applies to my case so it's a lot of trial and error. I'm also not the most skilled developer and manuals are often way too verbose and difficult to parse if they don't contain very clear examples. Sometimes, we just need someone to help translate our needs into a different wording and everything clicks into place. I'm sure that this causes a lot of repeated questions, but that's why when someone links a relevant question, it might be enough to solve the issue.
- gspr 6y ago
- zerr 6y agoThat's the good side of working on proprietary closed source codebase - one has so much freedom of expression, be it in the code or in the comments.
- rbrbr 6y agoPretty much what I am expecting from Windows based software considering the mess windows always was and is to this day.
- iforgotpassword 6y agoEh, I've seen similar stuff in the Linux/UNIX world. Whenever different software components interact there's a chance you need some stupid stuff to get them to play nice. As some issues get fixed over time, new ones arrive since something gets swapped out for the next big thing. The interaction of X, the display manager, logind and dbus on session start comes to mind. There's been stupid stuff in Xsession.d et al over the years while these evolved. xscreensaver also comes to mind; Jamie likes to keep all the legacy crap in the source code for operating systems and X extensions long gone, including rants about how they're broken under certain conditions, even if the bug is long fixed, just in case someone wants to compile the current version on their 1996 HPUX workstation.
- dragandj 6y agoWell, if anyone is still using screensavers in 2020, there is a good chance they’re running a 90’s system too :)
- marcosdumay 6y agoThose things are distracting a hell, so it's no surprise many workplaces mandate them. But it's never xscreensaver, of course.
- cblconfederate 6y agoYeah let's rewrite the entire system from scratch every 2 years with the langue-du-jour and deprecate everything. That 'll show them
- ezconnect 6y agoYes Windows is a mess but it's a beautiful mess and that is because of their mantra of being backwards compatible.
- ackbar03 6y agoWhat is the best library to use these days for developing in Visual C++? I had to write some VCpp code a few days ago using the Winhttp api and it was a nightmare. I'm not sure if its because I've been spoiled rotten by python where you can do a get/post request with a few lines of code, and that this is just how CPP is, but most of the complications are to do with calling and using the (not very well) documented API itself. Is there usually a easier way to do this? I'm just doing simple post and get requests, and I couldn't even do a file upload post properly by passing the binary data in, had to convert to base64 text in the end for it to work.
- mschuster91 6y agoFor http? Embed libcurl.
- speps 6y agovcpkg has lots of libraries and is well integrated with CMake or Visual Studio.
- DavidSJ 6y agoAt a web startup I worked at years ago, I spent all night tracking down a nasty bug related to user signups. I eventually traced it to one specific line of original founder code, and lo and behold, on that line was the comment: "this is probably buggy".
- CurtHagenlocher 6y agoTen years ago I found a comment in Excel's code base preceding a function over 1000 lines long that seemed to be parsing dates: // I just cleaned up the code. I have no idea what this fn does. Here is // what the comment said earlier for your reference! // --> BUG!! - this code is a crime against nature and has absolutely no // --> redeeming value (other than the amazing fact that it works)