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Mimic, the Evil Script That Will Drive Programmers To Insanity (github.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the let-the-hate-flow-through-you dept.

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Mimic implements a devilishly sick idea floated on Twitter by Peter Ritchie: "Replace a semicolon (;) with a Greek question mark (;) in your friend's C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error." There are quite a few characters in the Unicode character set that look, to some extent or another, like others – homoglyphs. Mimic substitutes common ASCII characters for obscure homoglyphs. Caution: using this script may get you fired and/or beaten to a pulp.

7 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Simple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    git revert [commit]

    "Your commit broke the build. Fix it."

    Bonus points if your continuous integration build server catches it automatically.

    Then have a talk with the author of this non-sense commit about wasting corporate resources.

    1. Re:Simple by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Besides, anyone here who can honestly say he never did the "magic" thing, i.e. delete a line and retype it only to have it suddenly work for no good reason whatsoever?

      I dare say that most programmers would simply delete the offending line and retype it once everything that does actually make sense has been tried.

      Black magic. Do it. I get the candles, Fred brings the voodoo doll, you can start chanting.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Simple by tomhath · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Then have a talk with the author of this non-sense commit about wasting corporate resources.

      Stern talk, as in "Clean out your desk." I would have zero tolerance for childish pranks like this.

  2. Maybe before source code control by Mr.+Sketch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wouldn't they see your change to the file in the history/blame for the line?

    Or do they suggest you hack your co-workers machine to run this script on their system?

    --
    Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
  3. Re:funny. by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's probably funny to people who don't have to earn a living. I expect I'd have considered it hilarious back in high school... but now, if a colleague did this, I'd probably demand he be fired.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  4. Re:Nice try ... by JoeyRox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's a good strategy because anyone working with Perl has probably already pulled all their hair out.

  5. Re:Never undstood this crap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The symbols are visually identical but have different meanings. For a human reading the text, with the human understanding of context and the weird, fuzzy logic that our brains do, that's not a problem. For a computer processing the text, however, it is important to be able to distinguish a semicolon (sentence not finished, or end of coding line, or terminator in a list containing commata) from a Greek question mark (interrogative sentence finished), especially in a text mixing Greek and Latin or English (especially ancient Greek, which rarely occurs alone in a book without either some sort of translation or at least a Latin introduction, a la the Oxford and Teubner series of texts). You could, of course, tag the shit out of the text with XML and mark the semicolons as la="grc" or la="el," but processing is easier when the character itself indicates its own semantics or differentiates itself from lookalikes.