Art Bahrs writes:

>I gotta mention that back in college we printed out the source for
>MPE 3 ( I
>think it was 3??? hmmm... been a while... it was in '84) I think....  and
>found lots of one-liners in the source code
>
>Things like "This is where all the good programs go to die!"  in the
>section for where prcesses end :)

This is pretty common. Programmers, after all, have little scope for
self-expression *except* in comments. The reason for this is that
humorous comments in the UI quickly become first humdrum, then silly and
finally annoying. Polite, yes, but not humorous.

The Apple C compiler for the 68000, while possessed of an excellent code
generator, suffered from this flaw. It produced "cute" error messages
like "a comma was a complete surprise to me at this point" or "expression
too complex (and I bet you can't understand it either)". But by the
hundredth time you've seen the compiler quit with the message "Too many
errors (make fewer)" when the real problem is weak error recovery in the
parser, it begins to get annoying.

I try to make my source code comments at least moderately entertaining
because someday, somebody may have to read them and it's better if the
material can keep their interest. Besides, when I'm writing Windows
programs, it's both cathartic and challenging to come with ways of
expressing my opinion of the software engineers responsible for
perpetrating it without actually calling them anything bad.

-- Bruce


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