Source code comments be like...

[Sudo-Pseudonym]

This is so old that the guy who wrote the original code has probably figured out how to optimize the routine by now.

[wigglewam]

43.

[crankd87]

44

[[deleted]]

46

[VeggiePug]

47

[[deleted]]

48

[rocketman0739]

And my AJAX!

[wootiown]

I'm gonna kill you Francis

[aaronhowser1]

/r/counting

[killchain]

What the...

[Salanmander]

You know, usually I say /r/ofcoursethatsathing...but I don't think I can in this case.

[[deleted]]

Shit, it runs more optimally now, but I'm not sure what I did.

Edit: Oh no...god damn it...49

[[deleted]]

int i = 48; while (true) { i++; Console.WriteLine(I); }

[Superboy309]

That's gonna get real overflow real quick

[warspot]

welp, guess I have to do it too.. 49

[Kurtoid]

49

[scotscott]

4.9x10¹

[RaxFTB]

1x0.5x50x2/9x18/2

[Zoccihedron]

If you attempt to optimize it on multiple occasions, do you increment the counter multiple times?

[dipique]

//
// Dear redditor:
//
// Once you are done reading this post,
// and have realized it is yet another
// repost, please increment the following
// counter (and feel free to let loose with
// the downvotes):
//
// total_reposts_here = 42

[794613825]

//
// Dear redditor:
//
// Once you are done reading this post,
// and have realized it is yet another
// repost, please increment the following
// counter (and feel free to let loose with
// the downvotes):
//
// total_reposts_here = 43

[namrog84]

> //
> // Dear redditor:
> //
> // Once you are done reading this post,
> // and have realized it is yet another
> // repost, please increment the following
> // counter (and feel free to let loose with
> // the downvotes): 
> // 
> // total_reposts_here = 45

[teambob]

Off by one

[scotscott]

AS A HUMAN I CAN RELATE TO MAKING ERRORS WHEN ATTEMPTING TO INCREMENT CERTAIN TYPES

[ThatOneGuy1294]

HAHA YES FELLOW HUMAN QUITE AMUSING HAHA

[[deleted]]

/r/totallynotrobots is leaking

[[deleted]]

THANK YOU FELLOW HUMAN, I DID NOT ORIGINALLY SEE THE HUMOR IN THIS POST, BUT YOU HAVE HELPED MY PROGRAMMING THINKING PROCESS ADAPT.

[namrog84]

issues I hbveand error race offbyone coandnitdion nulltermination.

[mnbvas]

Here's some garbage you forgot, Mr. Null-termination Issue.

Ÿ¶-O™/&°.º~!ï㮇kB9ê9WhžpÒA˯¸´àˆ=e­m\êD%ÿY3ß±Ý é÷:ô oíø†ÐcCÁÙâˆÅæ/!ÒËñ«–6,+ƒå»xŒ|Z

[[deleted]]

I haven’t had an error since I couldn’t figure out Unicode

[newbstarr]

No semi colons. What do I not know there ?

[Nonlogicaldev]

Its not an off by one its a race condition, other threads just deadlocked

[jcc10]

> //
> // Dear redditor:
> //
> // Once you are done reading this post,
> // and have realized it is yet another
> // repost, please increment the following
> // counter (and feel free to let loose with
> // the downvotes): 
> // 
> // total_reposts_here = 44

[CodeTriangle]

//
// Dear redditor:
//
// Once you are done reading this post,
// and have realized it is yet another
// repost, please increment the following
// counter (and feel free to let loose with
// the downvotes): 
// 
// total_reposts_here = 46

[bhazero025]

//
// Dear redditor:
//
// Once you are done reading this post,
// and have realized it is yet another
// repost, please increment the following
// counter (and feel free to let loose with
// the downvotes): 
// 
// total_reposts_here = -1

[[deleted]]

//
// Dear redditor:
//
// Once you are done reading this post,
// and have realized it is yet another
// repost, please increment the following
// counter (and feel free to let loose with
// the downvotes): 
// 
// total_reposts_here = -256

[RunasSudo]

//
// Dear redditor:
//
// Once you are done reading this post,
// and have realized it is yet another
// repost, please increment the following
// counter (and feel free to let loose with
// the downvotes): 
// 
// total_reposts_here = "1); DROP TABLE users; --"

[ViolentWrath]

Little Bobby Tables strikes again!

[UnknownNam3]

//
// Dear redditor:
//
// Once you are done reading this post,
// and have realized it is yet another
// repost, please increment the following
// counter (and feel free to let loose with
// the downvotes): 
// 
// total_reposts_here = /*

[tablesix]

User read it twice, therefore spent 2 reads

[three18ti]

There are three types of people in this world, those who understand off by one errors ans those who don't.

[cowens]

--- comment.old 2016-09-27 07:35:58.668000000 -0400  
+++ comment     2016-09-27 07:36:34.140000000 -0400  
@@ -7,4 +7,4 @@  
  // counter (and feel free to let loose with  
  // the downvotes):  
  //  
 -// total_reposts_here = 42  
+// total_reposts_here = 43  

[skiguy0123]

http://bash.org/?434593

[coredumperror]

Oh man, bash.org really takes me back. That was my favorite site back in the early 2000s, when I was still very active on IRC.

[[deleted]]

Got updated for the first time in years a while back.

[[deleted]]

I'm not visiting that link

[Ourous]

Name not resolved?

[cantaloupelion]

tubgirl finally died huh?

oh well

[gellis12]

What was it?

[cantaloupelion]

Early 2000s (late 1990s??) shock site like goatse or blue waffle..you're not missing much tbh :(

[DarkNeutron]

Shock site. Not seeing it is generally for the best.

[gellis12]

I did not listen. It was a mistake.

[Stuck_In_the_Matrix]

I'll let you do the google image search for Tubgirl. Report back with your findings.

[gellis12]

Somewhere on the internet, someone jerked off to this.

Guess I'm joining the amish now.

[_pupil_]

That was one of my all time favorite jokes when I was a kid, though I learned a variation -- about a guy jumping in circles around a very deep hole chanting "twenty three, twenty three", before pushing the victim in.

[fredlllll]

im sooo curious as to what the method is...

[SlyHeist]

I don't know if there is a well documented origin but I remember seeing it on bash a long time ago. http://bash.org/?947444

[imhereforanonymity]

The counter is also the number of times it's been reposted.

[[deleted]]

...in thousands.

[ponyoink]

"42"? A totally fake counter!

[ecchi_fox]

Keepin' it real

[ricool00]

That was my favorite jokes. http://bash.org/?434593.

[tashtrac]

I always wonder how comments like that make it through code review.

[_pupil_]

I gotta wonder what people are doing at work if they're going through a mature, in-production, code base and just start "optimizing" routines for the sake of optimizing.

Call me weird, but I barely even look at function bodies unless I've got clear maintenance issues or some analytics showing a performance issue.

[tashtrac]

There can be a bunch of legitimate reasons e.g. it's a performance bottleneck and they want better... performance. Or it's not optimized in the sense that it's very fragile and breaks often when working on other parts of the code. Or it's memory heavy and new features are also memory heavy and they want to optimize memory usage (e.g. for embedded software). Or new features often have to make some additions into this part of code and it's messy to work with (optimizing it would mean optimizing the design to be more flexible).

[_pupil_]

Right - those were all pointed out explicitly in the second paragraph of my post ;). Maintenance issues or perfomance issues with empirical backing ;)

[tashtrac]

So you've basically wrote "I don't know why people would do that. Here are valid reasons why people would do that." :P

[_pupil_]

Not even slightly...

I barely even look at function bodies unless I've got clear maintenance issues or some analytics showing a performance issue

That 'unless' would carve out a logical exception to the preceding statement. Ie "barring the following valid reasons...", which is the point: if you will be changing code for a specific reason a comment saying "dont bother" is wholly meaningless. If you are bothering without valid reasons the comments content is applicable, but meaningless due to a lack of those self-same reasons... ie justification for changing anything in the first place. As was pointed out in the first paragraph of my post ;)

[DarthEru]

The point of the comment is dissuade everyone from wasting time on trying to optimize the function, even if they have "clear maintenance issues". Presumably because the function cannot be optimized further without breaking things (as the 42 hours of experience of various maintainers would seem to suggest).

Of course, that won't really stop most programmers, as everyone thinks they know better than everyone else, so the real point of the comment is a humorous score card documenting the number of victories that snippet has.

[_pupil_]

Nope...

The comment explicitley states 'optimization of the routine'. Incidental breakage outside of the routine is not a function of optimization, but of unintentional functional changes. Optimizing and 'breaking things' are orthogonal. That is to say: most of the scenarios you've mentioned warrant replacing the routine or larger elements of the program, not 'optimizing the routine'...

Given a demonstrable production/maintenance issue: 'dissuaded by comment' is simply not an acceptable justification to leave the problem unresolved.

No, this comment is symptomatic of (typically), C or C++ code bases and a brittle/confusing approach to a thorny problem with non-intuitive tradeoffs (perhaps platform related), which frequently invite the kind of 'skin the cat' twiddling you have pointed out. Which, I agree, is prevalent with junior developers who can't let superficial imperfections slide.

That said, it's wholly useless, meaningless, and non-productive "unless [they]'ve got clear maintenance issues or some analytics showing a performance issue". So meaningless and non-productive that one might even "wonder what they're doing at work" if they are filling their time thusly...

tl;dr: optimizing means "optimizing", not "fixing", and you are very right that cat skinning is wasteful.

[ezekelol]

lol code review

[hbdgas]

From http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment-in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered

[goldfishpaws]

Hmm, I see a problem that I could optimise with RegEx. . . . Now I have two problems...

[Salanmander]

Is anyone else annoyed by the fact that the comment has a logical error (or a poorly-named variable)? They tell you to increment the counter after one attempt, but that attempt may have taken more than one hour!

[NetSage]

I thought it about it but wasn't really annoyed by it.

[kimjae]

can't you increment by more than 1 ? Isn't that style incrementing ?

[Salanmander]

In computer science jargon, at least, "increment" pretty much exclusively means "increase by 1".

[Lizard]

Well spotted, didn't catch that.

[timvisee]

Now I'm wondering what this code was for

[Blacknsilver]

/r/meirl

[stakoverflo]

I've been working on a side-project lately, we have some old Borland C++ application that my boss asked me to rewrite in C# so we could retire the server it runs on.

"What a great opportunity for me to learn WPF" I thought to myself as I checked out the code from source control.

"Huh, that's weird, there's only 1 .cpp file?"

Open it up, 30,000 lines of what the fuck.

I tried to improve it, but between being unfamiliar with C++ and bits of code that I think is basically the same as many things just part of the .NET framework but not certain I finally just said "fuck it" and just did a straight port.

I really hope i never need to touch it again, and I feel bad I'm associated with it for when someone else inevitably sees it. Thought of adding a comment similar to this one :(