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Mimic, the Evil Script That Will Drive Programmers To Insanity (github.com)
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.
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.
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.
is reserved for these kind of people...
One thing that always drove me crazy was the Unix "make" command because of the syntax of the Makefiles. The problem was, unlike just about every other language, Makefiles distinguish between TAB and SPACE characters, and they can look indistinguishable in printouts. I always avoided make for that reason and just wrote shell scripts to compile my code. I've also stayed away from Python because of its use of indentation to indicate the scope of control structures. Too easy to screw up by mixing tabs and spaces. In many fonts used in early terminals and printers, zeros were drawn with a slash through them so they wouldn't be confused with uppercase O's. Now with Unicode replacing ASCII as the encoding for source code in most languages, let the nightmares begin!
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
My students regularly copy-paste from an otherwise excellent source in which plain vertical double quotes have been auto-replaced with pretty slanted quotes. GCC complains about the illegal character on line XXX, I usually have to explain, and that's it. No hair-pulling involved, only git pulling.
Unicode in code is for people that do not understand what they are doing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Have gnu, will travel.
I understand perfectly that other languages have different symbols. But when those symbols are effectively identical to an existing symbol, JUST USE THAT SYMBOL. What idiot decided they had to make a different Unicode character for the greek questionmark, rather than simply using the semicolon? What, the dot above the comma in the greek questionmark is more squarish? Big deal
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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
It's funny to me as a theoretical thing. As a practical one, it's pointless and not a workable prank. Proving that a code change compiles is part of the review process. If someone checks in broken code anyhow, it'll cause the build gate to fail, and won't be pushed to the main repository. Release engineering and QA will get upset with them, and they'll have to fix it anyhow. No one else will be inconvenienced; releng will just have to track down who caused the problem, and QA might have to wait an extra day for whichever other changes were stuck behind the build gate.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You (well, people like you) are the reason I lock my workstation every time I leave my desk.
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I work for a university department. We don't have large development teams nor the same formal review process - a lot of times one person will handle a particular project from start to finish. One of my coworkers could, if they chose to, go onto a server and mess with a perl or python script.
Fortunately while I have coworkers that like to joke around, no one would consider this acceptable.
#DeleteChrome
And, really, anybody who doesn't do this at their place of work is probably both violating corporate security policies, and is likely an idiot.
If you're in an office full of people and not locking your computer and your personal items, you are simply asking for trouble.
Not saying trust nobody but ... well, actually, yes. I am saying that a healthy level of distrust is a good idea in general.
Sooner or later someone will reinforce that notion for you.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Having worked in several university settings, I know how small and undisciplined dev teams in academia can be.
Having moved to commercial web development, I also know how easy it is to set up a VCS for a small team.
Once any repo is managed in a VCS (like git and GitHub), it's fairly straightforward to check a project's history and discover when and where the project stopped working as expected.
If you're not using a VCS, you should seriously consider doing so given the small overhead of setting it up and the considerable security of deploying code so maintained.
blog
I'll second this. I'll even use VCS for a team of one.
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
It's important that children destroy: It teaches them that they're an influence on the world around them & they have impact.
Then at some later point they should be taught (or just realize) the value of creating over destruction.
This kind of thing is for people who never make it fully through that 2nd psychological development step.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
>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.
Great. You just fired young Steve Wozniak. I heard him talk a couple weeks ago, and the man was an inveterate prankster. He also encouraged all the young kids in the audience to try to think up clever pranks to pull on people as a way of honing their mental skills.