Slashdot Mirror
'I'm a Teapot' Error Code Saved From Extinction By Public Outcry (gizmodo.com.au)
An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:
It started back in 1998 as an April Fool's Day gag. Written up by Larry Masinter of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), error code 418 -- "I'm a teapot" -- was nothing more than a poke at the "many bad HTTP extensions that had been proposed". Despite its existence as a joke, a number of major software projects, including Node.js, ASP.NET and Google's Go language, implemented it as an Easter egg. A recent attempt to excise the fictitious code from these projects ended up doing the opposite, cementing it as a "reserved" error by the IETF...
Mark Nottingham, IETF chair for the HTTP and QUIC working groups, flagged the code's removal as an "issue" for Google's Go language, the Node.js Javascript runtime and Microsoft's ASP.NET... Nottingham's argument was that 418 was "polluting [the] core protocol" of these projects... It didn't take long for a "Save 418" website to go live and through the efforts of interested internet historians (and jokers), all three of the aforementioned projects have decided to keep the code as it is, though Google will "revisit" the situation with the next major version of Go.
The Save 418 site argued that "the application of such an status code is boundless. Its utility, quite simply, is astonishingly unparalleled. It's a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans. It'd be a real shame to see 418 go."
Mark Nottingham, IETF chair for the HTTP and QUIC working groups, flagged the code's removal as an "issue" for Google's Go language, the Node.js Javascript runtime and Microsoft's ASP.NET... Nottingham's argument was that 418 was "polluting [the] core protocol" of these projects... It didn't take long for a "Save 418" website to go live and through the efforts of interested internet historians (and jokers), all three of the aforementioned projects have decided to keep the code as it is, though Google will "revisit" the situation with the next major version of Go.
The Save 418 site argued that "the application of such an status code is boundless. Its utility, quite simply, is astonishingly unparalleled. It's a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans. It'd be a real shame to see 418 go."
This was just very forward thinking in preparation for IoT. Now, when your teapot can't connect to cloud it can tell you what the problem is ... "I am trying to connect to the internet and E418"
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
To be fair, Nottingham also wrote the draft that's now reserving the error code.
He recognized there was popular support for the error code, and revised his position to remove the error code only if every other three-digit error code starting with 4 is taken.
The work that software developers do is extremely mentally challenging. We're often under pressure to not only create a product that is good enough to be profitable (or at least helpful), but also to not make extremely subtle mistakes that results in security vulnerabilities, information exposure, or denial of service.
That's why we like putting little jokes in our software. It helps us cope with the pressure. It's why song lyrics, movie quotes and ASCII art find their way into code comments. It's why JIRA's about page is presented as an 8-bit video game. It's why we have an RFC describing an "evil bit". It's why error pages for popular source code repository have anthropomorphic robots. Hell, even MS Excel had a freakin' flight simulator built into it at one point!
The world is bad enough as it is without the misery-mongers demanding we excise all forms of fun from our line of work. Leave us alone. Let us have our fun. We know what we're doing.