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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

#141

Post by doright »

bmitc wrote: post #78
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.

I am in this camp as well. Even worse are cute error messages. If software actually worked, then I'd be fine with more whimsy. But it doesn't, so I'm not.

I remember when the Steam "login from a new computer" auth flow shoved a big "Hi there!" in user's faces the moment it blocked access to their entire online functionality until they left to get a code from their email and came back. Sometime later they removed it and now it's just "please look for the confirmation code sent to ".

I think in the push to make computing "friendlier" by dressing up error messages, past a certain point they began to come off as condescending. I wish modern UX could focus on working for me instead of trying to be my friend all the time.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#142

Post by rs186 »

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

Star Wars and Star Trek mean very little to people outside "Western" countries. If you go to China, most people won't understand a thing about Star Wars, including computer nerds/science fiction fans. And they live their life just fine.

Don't assume certain things that happened during a certain period are universal to everybody.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#143

Post by rs186 »

filoleg wrote: post #106
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

Not every nerdy person is into Star Trek? Star Wars is imo way more mainstream than Star Trek these days (especially with Disney pumping it), but even then there are tons of people in their 20s working in tech who haven’t seen it and have no interest in it. I don’t think there was more than one person on my previous Android team who would’ve gotten the Tricoder reference, and I was the youngest person there (29 years…

About a decade ago I started watching Star Wars movies for the first time, when there were "only" 6 movies to finish. But by then there were already 12+ Star Trek movies plus TV series. I decided that I'd "choose" Star Wars, and that was enough for me. I am sure Star Trek is a fascinating universe, and I see it mentioned all the time, but I don't think I care about it enough to ever go into that world.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#144

Post by serial_dev »

otras wrote: post #124
shkkmo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun names are OK, but only if they don't introduce ambiguity. In this case the change wasn't so much anti-fun as anti-ambiguity.

That's a great call-out, and it (along with the change itself) underlines the importance of not letting fun get in the way of actual engineering improvements. Defunnification as a side effect, if you will.

That variable name is still confusing.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#145

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

yomimiva wrote: post #31
agildehaus wrote: post #22

Reminds me of BeOS (and now Haiku), which have "is_computer_on()" and "is_computer_on_fire()" both with great descriptions. https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...

For the curious minds: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/system/libroo...

Makes sense:

is_computer_on() int32 is_computer_on(); Returns 1 if the computer is on. If the computer isn't on, the value returned by this function is undefined.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#146

Post by filoleg »

rs186 wrote: post #143
filoleg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every nerdy person is into Star Trek? Star Wars is imo way more mainstream than Star Trek these days (especially with Disney pumping it), but even then there are tons of people in their 20s working in tech who haven’t seen it and have no interest in it. I don’t think there was more than one person on my previous Android team who would’ve gotten the Tricoder reference, and I was the youngest person there (29 years…

About a decade ago I started watching Star Wars movies for the first time, when there were "only" 6 movies to finish. But by then there were already 12+ Star Trek movies plus TV series. I decided that I'd "choose" Star Wars, and that was enough for me. I am sure Star Trek is a fascinating universe, and I see it mentioned all the time, but I don't think I care about it enough to ever go into that world.

Yeah, pretty much the same for me.

Plus, Star Wars universe just felt way more interesting and fascinating to me than Star Trek as a kid.

Star Wars felt like knights and wizards and jet fighter pilots and heroic adventures in space, Star Trek felt like “adults doing boring adult things… but in space”. Not trying to dismiss ST, clearly it has a lot of appeal to tons of people, but it had zero appeal to me as a child.

It also helped that SW universe had some of my favorite games at that time, like SW:Demolition (vehicle combat genre, similar to Twisted Metal), Jedi Knight series, Knights of The Old Republic, etc.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#147

Post by beder »

coxley wrote: post #90

For many years at FB, suffixing dangerous or really-deprecated tokens with `_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` was the standard. Everyone[^1] was in on the joke. In the middle of the pandemic when ~50% of the workforce had started post-2020, it and other things became complaints for causing fear/uncertainty. We didn't do the best job on-boarding remote people and making them feel part of the culture at that time. [^1]…

At one point at Google, there was a huge chunk of code that was hard to understand, probably at the wrong place in the network stack, and stubbornly hard to change. And it kept growing, despite our efforts. We renamed it "[Foo]Sorcery" (this was about 10 years ago); people stopped trying to add to it, and periodically someone would come in and remove parts of it, all thanks (I think) to the goofy (and somewhat scary) name.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#148

Post by rkagerer »

agildehaus wrote: post #22

Reminds me of BeOS (and now Haiku), which have "is_computer_on()" and "is_computer_on_fire()" both with great descriptions. https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...

The latter missed a golden opportunity to be some kind of async event-based trigger.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#149

Post by rkagerer »

b0a04gl wrote: post #135

these get into logs, metrics, API contracts. now you're explaining isUserAGoat() to a partner team in a quarterly review. nobody’s laughing then funny thing is, linters catch unused vars but not unfunny ones. maybe we need a linter that flags joke names after 90 days. if it’s still funny, you keep it. else rename and move on

"Our developers have a sense of humor. Next question."

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#150

Post by furyofantares »

otras wrote: post #107
coxley wrote: post #90

For many years at FB, suffixing dangerous or really-deprecated tokens with `_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` was the standard. Everyone[^1] was in on the joke. In the middle of the pandemic when ~50% of the workforce had started post-2020, it and other things became complaints for causing fear/uncertainty. We didn't do the best job on-boarding remote people and making them feel part of the culture at that time. [^1]…

I remember seeing this in React's __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED, and I've always enjoyed similar lighthearted and unwieldingly-long names. Unfortunately I see it too has fallen victim to defunnification: https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/28789

Could have added a futurama reference to it

__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED_______OUT_OF_A_CANNON___INTO_THE_SUN

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