5 ms·

The daily wtf has been significantly fictional for decades

dhoe 5y ago
I have worked with someone who used female names for temp variables in the early 2000s. He also kinda saved us by substituting all icons with over the top cute looking ones the night before the demo, which was super efficient at distracting the audience from how disfunctional the application was.
- bemmu 5y ago
  Same, I was told my predecessor used his girlfriend’s name for temp variables.
  - SlowAndCalm 5y ago
    I use a random group of words as variable, etc. names when I can't think of them fast enough to stay in the flow. I find it easy to remember what each one does, and can go back and rename them to more reasonable things before doing a commit. It only takes missing one inexplicably named 'deodorant' variable, for me to want to sink into the depths of the Earth at the thought of people thinking I'm one of these eccentrics.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    >for temp variables Whew, savage.
tux3 5y ago
An area where GPT-3 might have some funny creative stories to contribute
tomalpha 5y ago
That may or may not be the case, but I worked with someone back in the early 00’s who named all their variables things to do with the planet or sky, actually including both of those words too. Everything was $sky, $cloud, $mist, $hill, $rainbow etc. The code was at times almost poetic, but a nightmare to debug. At least some of this sounds very plausible.
- knorker 5y ago
  This is still too common in network equipment, server names, and project names. So you need to know if some obscure name is the name of a star, galaxy, or a nebula, in order to know if it's a router, firewall, or server. Still better than naming shit after greek philosophers.
  - arethuza 5y ago
    It was practically mandatory in the days when Sun workstations were popular for them to have astronomical names. I thought I was being quite daring when the lab where I worked got a load of DEC Alpha workstations and I named them after Martian surface features as I'd just read Red Mars.
    - jjgreen 5y ago
      I worked at a place which had macho weather names for the Suns: "storm", "tempest" etc. I and another chap who started at the same time thought this was all rather silly, so we named ours "drizzle" and "damp"; this made the greybeards mutter somewhat.
      - arethuza 5y ago
        As a Scot I have to say that "dreich" would be a pretty good name for a machine ;-)
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      In the 70s it was somewhat mandatory to name CS research computers after characters and locations from Lord of the Rings. But there's still a difference between SET HOST RIVENDELL and naming all your variables after hobbits.
      - arethuza 5y ago
        In the mid 1980s the CS department I was at was fond of High-Level Hardware Orion minicomputers which were named after deities starting with "O": Ormazd being the one I can remember... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion

dhoe 5y ago

I have worked with someone who used female names for temp variables in the early 2000s. He also kinda saved us by substituting all icons with over the top cute looking ones the night before the demo, which was super efficient at distracting the audience from how disfunctional the application was.

bemmu 5y ago
Same, I was told my predecessor used his girlfriend’s name for temp variables.
- SlowAndCalm 5y ago
  I use a random group of words as variable, etc. names when I can't think of them fast enough to stay in the flow. I find it easy to remember what each one does, and can go back and rename them to more reasonable things before doing a commit. It only takes missing one inexplicably named 'deodorant' variable, for me to want to sink into the depths of the Earth at the thought of people thinking I'm one of these eccentrics.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  >for temp variables Whew, savage.

tux3 5y ago

An area where GPT-3 might have some funny creative stories to contribute

tomalpha 5y ago

That may or may not be the case, but I worked with someone back in the early 00’s who named all their variables things to do with the planet or sky, actually including both of those words too. Everything was $sky, $cloud, $mist, $hill, $rainbow etc. The code was at times almost poetic, but a nightmare to debug. At least some of this sounds very plausible.

knorker 5y ago
This is still too common in network equipment, server names, and project names. So you need to know if some obscure name is the name of a star, galaxy, or a nebula, in order to know if it's a router, firewall, or server. Still better than naming shit after greek philosophers.
- arethuza 5y ago
  It was practically mandatory in the days when Sun workstations were popular for them to have astronomical names. I thought I was being quite daring when the lab where I worked got a load of DEC Alpha workstations and I named them after Martian surface features as I'd just read Red Mars.
  - jjgreen 5y ago
    I worked at a place which had macho weather names for the Suns: "storm", "tempest" etc. I and another chap who started at the same time thought this was all rather silly, so we named ours "drizzle" and "damp"; this made the greybeards mutter somewhat.
    - arethuza 5y ago
      As a Scot I have to say that "dreich" would be a pretty good name for a machine ;-)
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    In the 70s it was somewhat mandatory to name CS research computers after characters and locations from Lord of the Rings. But there's still a difference between SET HOST RIVENDELL and naming all your variables after hobbits.
    - arethuza 5y ago
      In the mid 1980s the CS department I was at was fond of High-Level Hardware Orion minicomputers which were named after deities starting with "O": Ormazd being the one I can remember... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion