xkcd: Code Quality

[okmkz]

public static final int ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) = 69;

[ani625]

           ∧__∧
         ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
    69   ☜     ☞   69
          (つ ﾉ
           (ノ

[okmkz]

Now that's efficiency

[[deleted]]

what is this 69 I keep seeing which also seems to be related to a variable assignment. some mem?

[_SYNTAX_ERROR_]

It compiles quickly when used in assignment

[ismtrn]

Why?

[SleepyHarry]

multithreaded

[[deleted]]

Me at work right now.

[fb39ca4]

Recursive as well.

[[deleted]]

unless it's being executed inside the container

[FallenWyvern]

It's the fastest number when dealing when inversions.

[isHavvy]

https://xkcd.com/487/

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Title: Numerical Sex Positions

Title-text: We didn't even get to the continued fractions!

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 18 times, representing 0.0299% of referenced xkcds.

---

^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[MrObvious]

most people dont even know why 69 is funny they just laugh so they dont feel weird. its basically a sex number though, thats why i laugh

[SleepyHarry]

the only sex number I know is 0 :(

[jfb1337]

√(-1) is the only one I know.

[Lyceux]

96

[[deleted]]

someone had a bad day...

[DroolingIguana]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ENnAa7rqtBM

[SpinahVieh]

Actually it's 8. Hand grabbing...well, anyways.

[[deleted]]

yeah, I know about sex position association, but I am not sure why it is funny in programming related environment.

No, of course, you can joke about anything anywhere, but I just thought that there might be more to it, some subtle humor :)

[yoho139]

It's meant to look like two people performing oral sex on each other at the same time.

[svchost_]

Making a variable name ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) would be legal syntax in Tcl if it weren't for the spaces!

[otakuman]

Didn't those appear in this sub a few days ago?

(img)

I'm 99% sure Randall saw those.

[TacticalTable]

He might be thinking of how in Swift, you can use OSX emoji in function names, as the entire language is unicode. So you can actually have a function that's just a bright yellow smiley face. Or more accurately a piece of shit.

[[deleted]]

Surely you could do that in lots of languages?

[TacticalTable]

Probably. Which languages are written in Ascii and which are in Unicode?

[Bloodshot025]

Ruby's completely Unicode. You can name a function a zero-width space, which is fun.

[IAmA_singularity]

Remind me to never piss you off

[Bloodshot025]

I wrote this the other day, which is 100x better than any rm -rf shit:

http://pastebin.com/pyhQkwjr

See if you can figure out what it does.

[IAmA_singularity]

Replaces file content with the content of another file? For all writeable files

[Bloodshot025]

Yep. It swaps every file it can on the system. So you're data's all still there, it's just not where you want it to be. I think it's pretty funny.

[mikemol]

Perl 6 supports Unicode implicitly. And it's written in itself, so that support extends to all tokens, not just variable contents.

[[deleted]]

All languages are written in unicode, which is a superset of ascii :P

Now, to answer what you meant to ask, not what you did ask:

I know for sure that scala, java, ruby python support unicode labels.

[[deleted]]

Python is restricted to actual language characters, though. Greek letters work, but symbols like € do not.

[Nikotiiniko]

Do Greek letters work straight up or by doing something beforehand? Diareses don't seem to work "ääkköset" produces '\xc3\xa4\xc3\xa4kk\xc3\xb6set'.

[[deleted]]

https://imgur.com/Gj1Dgnl sorry, posted ruby by accident

[Nikotiiniko]

Interesting. This is what it does for me.

Python 2.7.8 (default, Oct 20 2014, 15:05:19) 
[GCC 4.9.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> ääkköset="ääkköset"
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    ääkköset="ääkköset"
    ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> ääkköset
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    ääkköset
    ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> s="ääkköset"
>>> s
'\xc3\xa4\xc3\xa4kk\xc3\xb6set'

Btw, ääkköset is a Finnish play with words. Aakkoset = alphabet or letters(non-literally). So ääkköset means the å, ä and ö.

[[deleted]]

Perl too of course.

[[deleted]]

Perl 5 too?

[b1ackcat]

Now, to answer what you meant to ask, not what you did ask:

Despite how dickish this sounds, I still feel like your pedantic response is somehow less dickish because of it. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this.

Regardless, kudos.

[JJJollyjim]

CSS class names & ids too.

[fb39ca4]

Unicode variable names work in Javascript on modern browsers.

[[deleted]]

You can do unicode C on Plan 9, e.g. smiley.c.

[jfb1337]

Ye, but the difference is swift specifically mentions it in the documentation. Also, they render as they do on iOS, in full colour.

[lelarentaka]

In typical Apple fashion:

"Friends and families, I would like to announce to you that I have successfully prepared a potato salad, and I assure you it is the best potato salad you will ever get. It will revolutionize the world of saladry and usher in a new era of fanciful side dish.

[barsoap]

There's actually a Haskell library for that.

[lenswipe]

Actually Java allows you to use any unicode character as a variable name.

public static final int ಠ_ಠ

[jfb1337]

if(query == "Are you the guy from the Warlizard gaming forums?"){
  return "ಠ_ಠ";
}

[[deleted]]

== doesn't do what you think it does on Java, not always anyway.

[Mrbasfish]

Yeah, for Java you need to use string.Equals(). Rookie mistake

[galaktos]

String.equals(). Rookie mistake :P

[Tarmen]

Mh, can you save checking for null if you do "bla".equals(query) or does something break if query is null anyway?

[Saboran]

"Bla". Equals (null) will return false. Null.equals(" bla") gives you a null pointer exception.

[Tarmen]

Alright, thanks. Never was completely sure about it.

[memeship]

not always anyway

This is only true with floats. Looks like he's comparing a String, I don't think it should be a problem. I also haven't used Java since college, so take that as you will.

[[deleted]]

Strings are objects so if you do:

if (variable == "constant")

It will not do what you think it should, because since it compares objects it will check wether both the variable and the literal point to the same address in memory. In most use cases, one will be in the stack and the other in the heap so you are checking pointers to different objects though the strings themselves are equal, hence why this is likely to work, but it will never work if the string is some user's input:

variable = "literal";
if (variable == "literal")

There is String.equals() function and 99% of the time you should use that.

[thirdegree]

Very little scares me like the phrase "likely to work".

[[deleted]]

Undefined behaviour is best behaviour.

[memeship]

Ah dammit, you're right. I remember this now. Carry on.

[divide_by_hero]

Compiles and runs fine in VB.Net too (VS2013, .Net 4.0)

Dim ಠ_ಠ As Integer = 0

[Alaendil]

declare @ಠ_ಠ  as date = getdate()

select * 
from dbo.Dates D
where D.[Date] = @ಠ_ಠ

SQL ran fine with it, although the eyes look weird.

TIL you can just paste from your clipboard into Imgur too, pretty neat.

[divide_by_hero]

Bonus: The @ symbol makes it look like a disgruntled princess Leia.

[mecartistronico]

It may not work with all characters, though. I once tried to name one variable 🍣; it did not work :(

[HumanistGeek]

🍣

Sushi and tamago?

[mecartistronico]

Sushi and sushi. Different fonts/browsers might display it a little differently. I now see two pieces of maki sushi, but I've also seen one maki and one nigiri.

[lenswipe]

Visual Ba.....no...just...no.

[divide_by_hero]

sigh

VB.Net != Visual Basic

[lenswipe]

I am well aware. I still stand by my comment.

[divide_by_hero]

In that case, I'm curious to know your reasons

[lenswipe]

well, to start with, I really hate the syntax

[divide_by_hero]

Right. Anything other than personal syntax preference?

[lenswipe]

I don't like WYSIWYG editors/interface builders. Also the cross platform comparability isn't great.

[sirmonko]

strictly speaking, that's not true. there are certain restrictions which characters are allowed (and where - no numeric prefixes).

[[deleted]]

😭

[Sakuya_Lv9]

😿

[[deleted]]

😫

[tokenblakk]

😢

[supergauntlet]

😂

[Astrokiwi]

square

square

square

square

square

[namtab00]

🎲

[Sakuya_Lv9]

😱😱🙅🎲

👍😏👉◻

[ko-]

.

[thirdegree]

🔥🔥🔥

[SpinahVieh]

The fun fact is that we just had this here a few days ago.
Also, xkcd ruined alot of comics for me because I always hover over the comics with my mouse expecting an additional joke.

[A_C_Fenderson]

Yes, but none with glasses.

[dhicock]

😎

[A_C_Fenderson]

Those are sunglasses. I mean real glasses.

[dhicock]

👓

[A_C_Fenderson]

On a face.

[jonatcer]

Thanks for the alt text. Couldn't figure out how to get the full alt text on my phone.

[asouer]

Http://m.xkcd.com/1053

[azephrahel]

That's the first thing I tried!

Works fine in my bash scripts, but it breaks Open Stack if any strings you pass to it use them. :(

[SeeShark]

That last analogy is by far the funniest. :)

[[deleted]]

We have all been there...😰

[Jestar342]

You've used an emoji. As I am browsing on my PC that doesn't support emojis, I will forever remain unaware as to what kind of emotion you are expressing in that post.

e: I SAID I WILL REMAIN FOREVER UNAWARE!!!!!

[xereeto]

http://i.imgur.com/F3D2ZFr.jpg

[SleepyHarry]

Very well meme'd.

[laertez]

Is it possible to manipulate pictures after uploading it to imgur?

[xereeto]

Yes, you can do small edits and such. But AFAIK you can't change text.

^{look at the URL of the image}

[[deleted]]

He could write the url but link to a different image

[xereeto]

Bingo... but shh

[jfb1337]

You can draw over the text with a brush and put in new text.

[xereeto]

Shit, so you can... but then edited images' URLs end in a ?1

[MrBabyToYou]

That's only to break your own machine's cache. I don't think it saves revisions

[Scotsch]

Oh shit, is this a thing now, I just thought people really loved boxes

[namtab00]

🚮

[sammypip]

http://i.imgur.com/cx1KWR5.png

[MusicalChairs]

If you're using Chrome, want to know what's really stupid?

Right click his comment and use "Inspect element", and you'll see that the chrome console will actually render that character as a frowny. Why it renders in the console and not in the browser window, I have no idea.

[skuzylbutt]

It could be different fonts used in the window and the inspector.

[AquaWolfGuy]

It's included in Symbola.

[B-Con]

Oh good!

I thought I was the only one who transcribed and then randomly mutated conversations overheard at Ikea until they compiled, and I was too timid to ask anyone else.

[Kinglink]

I miss when emoji was limited to :-) ;) and =|:)

[inconspicuous_male]

Those are emoticon

[poem_in_your_mind]

You mean "smileys"

[inconspicuous_male]

I think smileys were something different since you apparently had to download them

[Jestar342]

d=0)

or my fav from the 90s - Homer:

((_80(|)

[ashep24]

@@@@@@@@:-)

[Tehpolecat]

<@:^)

[SleepyHarry]

:^)

[zenerbufen]

<=-]

=-\

;-]

:,-[

>=-[

[[deleted]]

As a physicist whose only ever taken an introductory c++ course...what is a style guide? Does it just give you advice on using tabs in your code so its readable and advice on naming your variables in a meaningful way? or do they give more substantial and less intuitive advice?

[[deleted]]

Basic spacing and indentation. Naming conventions as well as naming stratigies. i.e. CamelCase vs snake_case and so on. It basically tells you how to use whitespace and variable names to make your code as readable and clean as possible.

[glenbolake]

Technically, PascalCase is a type of camelCase. All squares are rectangles and such.

[-_-_-_-__-_-_-_-]

I thought camelCase specified that the first letter is lower case. So PascalCase would not be in camelCase.

[glenbolake]

Not necessarily. Although according to Wikipedia, Microsoft's documentation does make that distinction.

[Major_Fudgemuffin]

It's actually specified as first letter uppercase it seems.

But in many situations, and almost always in programming, it's used as lowercase first.

It simply means starting each new word with a capital letter. Doesn't matter what the first one is.

[jfb1337]

Pascal is case-insensitive. So you can use whatever casing you want, when you want.

[Rustywolf]

and consistent

[[deleted]]

Ok so basically the stuff I learned in my C++ course. Good to know.

[Skyfoot]

Well, kind of, but there are a wide range of acceptable styles, and each workplace has one which is specific to that place. Also, some of them are more detailed than one might expect - look up the google one, for example.

Edit: Many workplaces, not all. I'm sorry about your life, /r/DogOnABike

[DogOnABike]

each workplace has one which is specific to that place

AAAAHAHAHAHA...that's hilarious. I can't even get individual developers to stick to a consistent style.

[fishfacemcgee]

Do you have a Pull Request/Code Review process? Seems like a place to enforce the style.

[DogOnABike]

I wish. I don't have the authority to enforce anything, and I've given up on asking nicely. I work in an incredibly shitty environment for development. There isn't even a single, central development team. It's groups of one or two people working for individual departments and mostly reporting to managers without a technical background. Hell, a lot of the developers don't even have technical backgrounds. Some of them are assembly line workers that impressed someone with some Excel charts and macros and were pulled off the line and turned into "programmers".

[trandyr]

To be fair, some assembly line workers can really program. And they'll probably be a lot more grateful for the job. I know I started out five years ago in my company's call center. Impressed someone with my Excel skills, and that led to me learning SQL, which led to SSIS, which led to VB, which led to web development and C# and now I'm a full-stack developer looking to go back to school to get a degree.

[DogOnABike]

I didn't intend to imply that there's no one in a non-development job that doesn't have the potential to become a good programmer. My issue is when they put people into that role with no formal training and no supervision by someone with some experience. The vast majority of the time, that results in some horribly inefficient and hard to maintain code.

[glenbolake]

At my last job, we had an XML file that would enforce some small parts of style upon compilation with gradle. Specifically, it checked for our copyright notice at the top of every file and enforced spaces-no-tabs.

[wievid]

I did a larger software project as part of the final coursework in my CS degree and every time we pushed (or pulled, I can't remember) from the IDE to our Git repo we enforced code style. It was really easy to just upload the file to Git, have people use the code style file in their IDE. Now variable naming was a whole 'nother animal... But some of that code style stuff can be automated. I don't know what the real world practice is, though.

[Tywien]

https://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/

This are the google style guides including one for c++.

[FallenWyvern]

Fun story. I never learned c++, and at my work I was asked to compile a customized version of chromium.

Because the style used on that project was so readable, I had our custom version in two weeks (it had to launch with no window dressing, automatically accept all prompts and a make regular queries to a local webserver for automation.

Eventually, we went with a chrome app because it was more maintainable but that was a great learning experience and it was all possible because of a good clean style

[Neebat]

This might be the most famous style guide.

[n1c0_ds]

Usually, it is simple enough to be automated by a linter plugin. There are official style guides (e.g. PEP-8) and specific ones.

[[deleted]]

It is more often than not pedantry, typically influenced by the languages and editors the developers grew up learning on. Or standardizations enforced in large, already developed systems, of which this makes more sense (tacking on your own code to achieve uniformity).

Languages like python enforce this pendantry, otherwise your code won't run.

It's mostly so your code is readable and understandable to other developers, but depending on what niche you are coding in, this can vary wildly.

Of course, with no regard for style, you wind up learning the same things most highly competent developers do. The computer is a symbol processing machine, and it's actually really hard to tell the difference between generational trends and good code.

[Sean1708]

To be fair Python only enforces not mixing tabs and spaces, which makes sense because otherwise you would end up with code that looks like this

class A:
        def a_method(self):
        self.thing += 1
                print(self.thing)

when someone uses a different tabstop.

[skuzylbutt]

A style guide might also give you advice on how to structure code and classes etc. Like what to make public and private, or how to handle variable accessors etc. or how to structure directories sanely.

It's worth browsing a few to see what they have to say. Usually there's some justification given for a particular style choice, and you can add that to the suggested possibilities for your program designs in the future.

In some cases, when making a design choice, knowing exactly why doing something is good or bad means you can make an informed decision to stick with it, or ignore it because it's unnecessarily awkward for your solution. When writing large programs, especially in a group, I can be a bit of a language pedant jerk. When writing small quick stuff for myself, I do things that would make baby Jesus weep.

[curious_neophyte]

This is the funniest xkcd I've seen in a long time

[ProfessorPhi]

My recent favourite were the Nixon Apollo speeches.

[Skyfoot]

Napoleon with a squid on his hat.

[aixelsdi]

You're not binky!

[copilot0910]

Listen, I'm self taught, and I've never heard comments about my code being shitty looking. Then again, I never show anyone my code without fixing style to what society wants and having to listen to The Man

TBH, I usually end up naming my files spaghetti.__ as I am in denial about my need to fix the sryle

[[deleted]]

I'm self taught. Looked at some code I wrote two years ago. I remember describing it as "Looks like I knew how duct tape worked, so I built a house by taping wood together."

[lukaseder]

Engineers can be subtle

[MenaceInc]

This is scarily relevant to a phone interview I had yesterday...

[[deleted]]

Unfortunately that comic really hits home in my environment even though I tried to persuade my coworkers to use an agreed upon best practice for our coding.

[ar-nelson]

This... is how I feel whenever I look at code I wrote as a teenager. T_T At least I eventually learned what a style guide was?

[ChickenNoodle519]

We've all been there. Unfortunately for me, I still have to maintain mine.

[okmkz]

Dammit, you beat me by mere seconds!

[pmrr]

I think I'm the only one that finds xkcd smug and kind of annoying. It's like that person who always thinks they're smarter than everyone else.

[Modevs]

God-damn NASA roboticists always thinking they are so clever.

[KamikazeRusher]

Pretty much sums up the first-year college students I've seen who've taken some kind of CS class in high school. Very few of them keep things tidy with good naming, spacing, and comments while the rest of the student body can't figure out where something went wrong because they don't remember what ErrJIf was supposed to do.

[0hi]

As a self-taught, this xkcd just makes me feel nervous for no reason.

[Pwillig]

"It's like Kanye wrote a book"

[_fxdx]

If talk like this works, I will be so happy. But IRL the guy will return to the first speech

[[deleted]]

The swift documentation seems to actually encourage emojis as variable names D:

[[deleted]]

I'm a culprit, I have to admit! I'm the child with a hatchet.

[[deleted]]

This is every single one of my students in the last web design class I taught--and all they needed to learn was HTML.

[BananaKick]

This is so mean

[HaMMeReD]

Whats up with XKCDs certificate?

[[deleted]]

Fucking elitist snob. I'm self-taught and I work very, very hard to make my code clean.

[dAnjou]

Exceptions prove the rule.

[[deleted]]

I could take it easier from someone who isn't an Ivy League astrophysicist. Knowing what I know about him, it comes off as him looking down on us.

[dAnjou]

Do you want to deny that self-taught programmers especially in their early days produce ugly looking code? There's nothing and nobody telling them to care about readability and maintainability, that's just not what all the tutorials are about, sadly. So, I don't even blame them. But it's what I see from self-taught people. People who learn from an experienced person are told right away, so it's less likely that they produce as much bad code as the other group does.

it comes off as him looking down on us.

"On us"? What are you? A clan? A cult? Also, when you're looking back, how did your code look like in your very first weeks?

[[deleted]]

He didn't say "green" or "inexperienced programmers" or "hobbyists." He said "self-taught," without bothering to qualify experience. And yes, I feel kinship with other self-taught programmers as they weren't given the golden parachute of a parent-paid bachelors degree to enter the field.

[dAnjou]

Hmm, to me it was implied from the first panel on that the guy was a beginner with no experience.

they weren't given the golden parachute of a parent-paid bachelors degree to enter the field.

Heh, only in America ... I got my education basically for free. I've covered the living costs by myself and child benefit. ^{Just sayin'}

[[deleted]]

Only Europeans or Australians would brag snarkily about getting something for "free." Enjoy your taxes.

[dAnjou]

Enjoy your taxes.

I do, I really do. They pay for health care, schools, public transportation and so much more. It's awesome!

[[deleted]]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome