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Ask HN: Are Funny Code Comments Useful? (webmaster-talk.com)

4 points by nickmolnar ↗ HN
I am wondering if anyone has worked on an open-source project where people, regularly, included a little humor in their code.

Did this make the project go faster, and development more fun, or was it just distracting?

Funny examples of your own would be appreciated.

8 comments

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lbrandy
Of course they are. Humor is useful. We tracked down a bug in our code the other day to one of the hard-coded internal constants being too high... It had the comment "I sort of just made this up. Probably worth testing." If it had been commentless, we would have worried by moving it we'd fix our use-case but break some other use-case.
gabrielroth
What's useful there is not the humor but the information.
lbrandy
Humor is still useful, just less evidently. It helps create a good environment and culture.
tjr
I agree entirely, but I have learned that some major airplane manufacturers hold quite the opposite opinion.
silentbicycle
I don't think that's an example of humor in comments -- it's just saying, "I'm not sure this is right, you should test it." That's pretty important, actually.

I think the question is more about comments that are just puns or something, like:

  p = point(w, 0, 0);     /* woo hoo! */
maryrosecook
I ocasionally find myself writing, "Warning: obscenely hackalicious hackety hack", or something similar. When I come across it later, it makes me laugh and makes me refactor.