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Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

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Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#51

Post by Sebb767 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #33
londons_explore wrote: post #8

Notice how pretty much none of these are added in the last 10 years? Android's become 'more mature' - ie. Boring, and the joke to code ratio is dropping rapidly.

I've noticed that modern life is in general less fun than it was 10 years ago. It might be me getting older, but I'm sure there are bigger societal changes too. BTW I used to browse tcrf.net and it was so interesting that video game developers would leave pieces of themselves in their work. Love letters, old memes, angry letters, random shit, whatever. Meanwhile modern programming is all about pRoFeSsIoAnALisM and Ma…

> BTW I used to browse tcrf.net and it was so interesting that video game developers would leave pieces of themselves in their work. Love letters, old memes, angry letters, random shit, whatever.

This is quite dependent on the games you play. Modern games are becoming larger, which makes the project overall more serious and makes it harder to hide easter eggs. That being said, Indie games with small teams still contain a lot of fun and even AAAs can still contain some goodies.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#52

Post by eptcyka »

tikhonj wrote: post #44
magospietato wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a middle ground for sure. I've left a few witty comments and loglines in my time. But I've also had to debug a Delphi unit which returned error codes inspired by the magical supercomputer Hex from the Discworld novels. "Divide by cucumber error" is not a decent enough representation of a module's internal state, no matter how funny you think you are.

But a wholly non-funny "Invariant Violated" message would be no better. The problem isn't that the message is funny, but that it does not contain the information you need to understand what's going on. The whimsy is just a distraction.

Do you find that distracting things help you debug shoddy code?

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#53

Post by saidinesh5 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #33
londons_explore wrote: post #8

Notice how pretty much none of these are added in the last 10 years? Android's become 'more mature' - ie. Boring, and the joke to code ratio is dropping rapidly.

I've noticed that modern life is in general less fun than it was 10 years ago. It might be me getting older, but I'm sure there are bigger societal changes too. BTW I used to browse tcrf.net and it was so interesting that video game developers would leave pieces of themselves in their work. Love letters, old memes, angry letters, random shit, whatever. Meanwhile modern programming is all about pRoFeSsIoAnALisM and Ma…

I think it really is up to us to make things as fun as we want to see... There may be more minefields as we grow old (Can a senior pull a harmless prank on newly joined juniors without coming off as mean/threatening?), but at the same time these little joke comments/commit messages, pranks etc.. are what brought people closer together in every place I worked at so far...

I mean what other choice do we really have? let the fun police win?

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#54

Post by justsomehnguy »

riffraff wrote: post #23
justsomehnguy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to be. Hint: it was never big outside of the USA. If anything, Internet and the Hollywood reboots is the way most people outside of the USA learnt about it. Also try to find Europe in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_influence_of_Star_Tre...

Are you sure? I'm Italian and we had Star Trek (all the films, all the shows, many of the books), and apparently the Star Trek Italian Club[0] was funded in 1982. I think Spock and Kirk were quite familiar to most people, and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot. [0] https://stic.it/

> , and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot.

Everybody, Gates and Slashdot in one sentence.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#55

Post by wiseowise »

ramon156 wrote: post #27
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good, I hate ‘funny’ code. Just get to the point, I’m not here for someone’s notionally hilarious inside joke from 18 years ago.

Live a little. When you've passed away, was all the seriousness paid off? That said, funny code should still work

Who cares what happens after you’ve passed away. You’re dead.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#56

Post by arccy »

eptcyka wrote: post #52
tikhonj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a wholly non-funny "Invariant Violated" message would be no better. The problem isn't that the message is funny, but that it does not contain the information you need to understand what's going on. The whimsy is just a distraction.

Do you find that distracting things help you debug shoddy code?

if "divide by cucumber" is a unique string in the code base, then yes?

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#57

Post by sorenjan »

kretaceous wrote: post #4
dylan604 wrote: post #2

How is someone writing an article about Android source code node nerdy enough to know what a Tricoder is? I don’t buy it

They are in their early 20s and not American¹. Why is that so hard to grasp? 1: https://voxelmanip.se/about/

I think you're underestimating how Americanized Swedes are.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#58

Post by olvy0 »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #18
Agentlien wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I found it surprising at first I don't think it should be. Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to be.

> Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to be. Hint: it was never big outside of the USA. If anything, Internet and the Hollywood reboots is the way most people outside of the USA learnt about it. Also try to find Europe in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_influence_of_Star_Tre...

Adding to the comments: Not an American, but like others here watched TNG every day after school, and TOS before that. Many other people my age did, for example my wife.

BTW, we have watched with our sons all of TNG and DS9 for the last 3 years, and our eldest is now deeply familiar with Star Trek as a result. Very few of his peers are familiar with it, though.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#60

Post by objclxt »

uncircle wrote: post #59

public static final String DISALLOW_FUN The default value is false. [...] Type: Boolean [...] Constant Value: "no_fun" Source: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManag... --- How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings on Android?

> How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings on Android?

You are misreading the documentation, it's a key/value API.

`DISALLOW_FUN` is the string key you pass to `setUserRestriction`, which takes a boolean value.

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