Inside the OpenSolaris Source Code

An anonymous reader writes "Ten million lines of code and not a single profanity? Is that really possible? Apparently, yes, says OpenSolaris community manager Jim Grisanzio. He said even before Sun filtered the code, it was relatively free of profanity. 'They went through the code for a great many things,' he said, 'and I'm sure they cleaned a word or two. Or three.' But a careful look through the code will reveal some programmers' frustration." From the article: "The most embarassing comment came from a developer of the GRUB project who went only by the name of 'Gord'. 'This function is truly horrid,' he wrote. 'We try opening the device, then severely abuse the GEOMETRY->flags field to pass a file descriptor to biosdisk. Thank God nobody's looking at this comment, or my reputation would be ruined.'"

Comments

Re:Odd Fascination

[BlogPope]

What's this fascination with dirty words in the code?

The code might be compiled and run on some unsuspecting souls computer. Once the computer learns that kind of language, the next thing you know it will be downloading porn!

I should know, that how it got on my computer!

everyone gets burned

[micromuncher]

Hasn't everyone been burned by this? And why is it a big deal? It's not like professional developers never curse or get frustrated.

It is worse when questionable things get present to end users and/or clients. In a UI demonstration of an accounting project, I had a button called "Do Me". It didn't go over so well. But somehow it came out that one of the underlying combo boxes was called "ViagraComboBox" because it outperformed... that didn't go so well. So now all my code is antiseptic, just because its not good to show "unprofessionalism" infront of the client.

The worst thing I've ever heard was a friend gave a demo of a pipeline monitoring application to a client. During the course of a demo, a pumping station turned red to show an alarm, followed by a small mushroom cloud animation... suffices to say the client walked out of the meeting. (But hey, he now works at Microsoft.)

my favorite comment

[k4_pacific]

In a piece of C code where I work that has Unicode support, I saw this comment, by itself, within a routine that did some string manipulation: // I'm hot for TCHAR.

embarrasing code....

[MauMan]

I remember once when I was was trying to track down a bug I wrote some debugging code which I then commneted out with: #ifdef _SEX_WITH_FARM_ANIMALS_ ...Debugging code... #endif Later, someone wanted to integrate with my code so I saved it off to the interim repository and a few minutes later I got a visit from my co-worker.

Boy he had some fun at my expense...

Another client horror story.

[CyricZ]

I worked at a pretty laid back development firm developing various applications in VB. Well, one of the projects was a school library management system. One of my coworkers was, well, a bit of a freak. He had a strange obsession with penises and boners.

One of his jokes was to attach code to a button that would make an animation of a penis erecting and ejaculating appear, but only after every 7 or 8 clicks of that button. Normally he would only keep such code in for a day or so, until somebody in QA ran across it.

Anyway, at one point we were at a conference of school librarians demoing our product to them. Things were going well, until we clicked on a button, and up on the large screen came an animation of an erect penis ejaculating. Needless to say, we were quite embarrassed! I don't think he was with the company much after that.

Re:http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/search?q=fuck

[happymedium]

1782 for (tp = node->tgn_typelist; tp != NULL; tp = tp->tgt_next) {
1783 if ((kind = mdb_ctf_type_kind(tp->tgt_type)) == CTF_K_UNION) {
1784 /*
1785 * Fucking unions...
1786 */
1787 found = NULL;
1788 break;
1789 }

Aha! Clearly, Sun programmers oppose organized labor! Such shameless politicking--in code, no less... tsk, tsk...

Re:Who cares?

[MynockGuano]

In today's modern galaxy there is of course very little still held to be unspeakable. Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that were they to be merely breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme case shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed, and totally un****ed up personality.

So for instance, when in a recent national speech the Financial Minister of the Royal World Estate of Quarlvista actually dared to say that due to one thing and another and the fact that no one had made any food for a while and the king seemed to have died and that most of the population had been on holiday now for over three years, the economy was now in what he called "one whole joojooflop situation," everyone was so pleased he felt able to come out and say it they quite failed to notice that their five thousand year-old civilization had just collapsed overnight.

But though even words like joojooflop, swut, and turlingdrome are now perfectly acceptable in common usage there is one word that is still beyond the pale. The concept it embodies is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the galaxy except one where they don't know what it means. That word is 'belgium' and it is only ever used by loose-tongued people like Zaphod Beeblebrox in situations of dire provocation.

Don't forget to strip symbols, too!

[Dr. Manhattan]

At my last job a guy told me the story of a programmer forced to implement some stupid feature due to a customer demand. He made the behavior dependent on a conditional variable named "CustomerIsAnIdiot".

Then the customer hooked up a debugger...

Amusing things that frequently end up in my code:

[allanc]

1. BHAD ('Breach Hull, All Die'). When I'm writing code that I don't expect other people to use, this is the name I give to error-handling stuff.

2. "OH MY GOD BEAR IS DRIVING CAR!" is how I tend to label code that should Never Happen. I was working as a contractor at my current company and this ended up in some of my code. After they decided to hire me on as a full time employee, my boss mentioned that this comment was one of the primary factors in that decision. It's good to work for a company with a good sense of humor. :)

Re:Odd Fascination

[sconeu]

Reminds me of a story my old manager once told me.

He was writing some artillery control software, and written a Fire Unit Check routine. He didn't even consider the acronym. Needless to say, at the code review, it got changed.