Crazy Comments

[Xanawatt]

Was just reading some code on some team’s github pages and saw this:

    // Java multithreading magic. Do not touch.
    // Touching will incour the wrath of Cthulhu, god of java and LED Strips.
    // May the oceans of 1's and 0's rise to praise him.
    private class DotStarsTask extends TimerTask {
        private DotStarsLEDStrip m_leds;


        public DotStarsTask(DotStarsLEDStrip leds) {
            if (leds == null) {
                throw new NullPointerException("Given DotStars Controller Class was null");
            }
            m_leds = leds;
        }


        @Override
        public void run() {
            m_leds.updateColors();
        }
    }

From https://github.com/RobotCasserole1736/CasseroleLib/blob/master/java/src/org/usfirst/frc/team1736/lib/LEDs/DotStarsLEDStrip.java

I know there are other crazy comments that you have run across. What are some of them?

[fargus111111111]

One of the programming students left little notes all over the code (we use labview) one day for me to look at to try and help him fix it, but one of the comments read “DO NOT TOUCH! I promise this works (sorta)” and another which dubbed the robot, computer, and code all potatoes.

[GeeTwo]

I have seen these:

/* Heisenberg Code: do not add debug statements */

# HEH HEH HEH, EH!

There’s an error message in some code at work which converts the legacy format data into an even older format with an error message that mostly occurs after a system upgrade:

Armageddon has occurred.
Please proceed through the portal to the afterlife of your choice.

The guy who wrote that moved on to another project several years ago, but the error message hasn’t changed, because the new programmers now know what an armageddon error is.

Edit: One of our programmers called our 2014 ball intake process “tickle” in code.

[tr6scott]

Labview team… so these are some of the trinkets spotted over the years…

“Capture2” more time spent editing icon, than creating auto-shifting logic.

“Capture1” Added extra wire length to support team identification.

“Capture” Will, learning this is more than just robots.

[Andrew_Schreiber]

I think my favorite that someone else left was

This is Schreiber’s fault

It was code that, while we all understood it, was one of those things only someone with a love of functional program could like. Which on that team was mainly me.

[FlamingSpork]

This is in my team’s vision code.

//This is important Java voodoo magic.  It loads the JNI component of OpenCV using alchemy and magic.
		//System.loadLibrary(Core.NATIVE_LIBRARY_NAME);
	    System.loadLibrary("opencv_java310");

In our robot code, our vision LED ring is called variously “greenRingOfDeath”, “greenSauron”, and “eyeOfSauron”. They weren’t joking when they called it SuperBrightLEDs.

[kelef]

Our code is saved under “sketchy bot” and the comments only get better from there

[AdamHeard]

I’ve been told some of our older code includes lots of comments along the lines of, “this is really hacky and dumb but Adam made me do it…”

[Kev2018]

On our FTC robot code, we named all of our motors juicyMotorFrontLeft,juicyMotorBackLeft, etc… and our hooking mechanism is thresh.

[AirplaneWins]

In our vision code, the entire lyrics to Paint it Black are typed out in comments.

[AriMB]

I was helping a team debug their code, and every one of their Class names was a different four letter word. Completely unrelated to it’s function. For example:

Sh*t sh*t1 = new Sh*t();

(except without the *)

I tried to get them to rename stuff to better describe what it does, but they were very happy with the names as they were.

[GeeTwo]

@AirplaneWins

In our vision code, the entire lyrics to Paint it Black are typed out in comments.

You should teach your programmers not to use copyrighted code without permission. Lyrics, even more so!

[Brian_Michell]

While teaching students if structures, I made them write a case that was sort of like this:

if(1>2){
   System.out.println("Math is broken and the world is ending);
}

We all got a good laugh about it.

[Kevin_Sevcik]

@Brian Michell

While teaching students if structures, I made them write a case that was sort of like this:

if(1>2){
   System.out.println("Math is broken and the world is ending);
}

We all got a good laugh about it.

Next up is teaching them about NaNs:

double a = 0/0;

if(a!=a){
   System.out.println("Yes, a does not equal a in this case.  Really.");
}

[Jeremy_Germita]

Not a comment, but this is the laziest line of code I have ever written:

System.out.println("team, avg, max, min, confidence".replace(", ","	"));

too lazy to manually replace 4 commas with tabs, not lazy enough to forget about String.replace();

[AirplaneWins]

@GeeTwo

You should teach your programmers not to use copyrighted code without permission. Lyrics, even more so!

We will try not to type up any more songs.

[AirplaneWins]

@GeeTwo

You should teach your programmers not to use copyrighted code without permission. Lyrics, even more so!

Though I don’t think paint it black would be considered copyrighted code

[GreyingJay]

This has been lurking in our codebase for the last 3 years.

float boat; // must be a float or else it will sink

I hope it never goes away.

[GeeTwo]

I’ve never checked for it, but I heard that our 2015 manipulator, BiLL (for Binary Load Lifter) had some comments indicating C3PO was one of the programmers. :]

[TylerHarmon]

I was reading through 254’s code from 2015, once upon a time, and I remember something that made me laugh. They had a comment for what I think was a tote intake roller, and the comment was something along the lines of

// SpinnyThing™

The TM part I thought was very subtle and funny
It’s still there, if you can find it.