Is This the Death of the Easter Egg?

An anonymous reader writes: The BBC reports that more and more companies are cracking down on the practice of hiding harmless snippets of code in their products. Known as "Easter eggs," they can be anything from the names of the developers, to pictures, to games like pinball, to a flight simulator. Is this simply professionalism, or is it stifling programmers' quirky, playful side? (Have you created any Easter eggs yourself? If so, what did they do?)

Comments

Early days of PHP

[nbvb]

I once managed a department website - back in the mid 90s - and anytime you added someone named Fred to the administrative directory, it set their photo to Fred Sanford and started playing the theme to Sanford & Son.

Mid 90s PHP was fun...

Best easter egg of all time

[elmer at web-axis]

I created a easter egg in a piece of software i wrote for a client after they hired me to fix a backend problem. It causes a pie symbol to appear on their webpage and when you click on it and enter in some special key strokes it allows entry into the system by passing their 'Gatekeeper' authentication system. Problem is now I'm on the run and the FBI is hunting me.

Re:Mamangement

[bmo]

An Easter Egg, in the construction sense that you describe, would be more like the time a construction crew opened up the wall in my apartment to fix a leak in a pipe and found a lunchbox that someone left behind when the building was built in 1928 with a note inside reading "Hello."

Sometimes it's a singing frog.

Don't bother trying to put the frog on Broadway, though.

http://static.comicvine.com/up...

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BMO

Re:Document your Easter eggs

[tepples]

I guess in today's security-conscious world, you have to break some definitions to make an omelet.