Coding profanities

[tim123]

I remember a using a dos program once that became more and more insulting with its error messages the more times you made a mistake typing in the parameters.

tim

[wendigo100]

I wrote a random insult generator in BASIC while working at GEC. We had minutes of fun with that.

[roamer]

Worked at one place where an aspberger programmer insisted on variables like ROAST-BEEF and CARROTS.

Needless to say only he could debug the code.

I would have fired the tosser...

No doubt that programmer was far more intelligent than you kojak. Why else would you be jealous?

[threaded]

I remember a using a dos program once that became more and more insulting with its error messages the more times you made a mistake typing in the parameters.

tim

There was a research project at Sheffield University where they wrote something like that. They were trying to find out what aspects of the interface made computers most difficult to use, and hence know to concentrate on fixing those problems. IIRC it was called Abusive Response System Environment, (one of those where they started with the acronym and worked back to the name.)

[TheMonkey]

There was a research project at Sheffield University where they wrote something like that. They were trying to find out what aspects of the interface made computers most difficult to use, and hence know to concentrate on fixing those problems. IIRC it was called Abusive Response System Environment, (one of those where they started with the acronym and worked back to the name.)

NTL use it in their call centres now.

[mcquiggd]

I once worked with a guy who wrote code such as:

On Error Goto Cleethorpes

He was a contractor, so he deliberately wrote code that no-one else understood.

[malvolio]

I used to do things like that in my coding days - how about a geographically accurate OS macro that started at John o'Groats and exited at Lands End. The code was so boring to write, you had to spice it up somehow. Or another one that would echo your CLI typing in reverse font from the right of the screen? Or one I wrote to scare off a user who kept playing with commands to "see what they did" on a production system - Death.com switched off all the interrupt commands and started to display messages that looked like it was wiping the system disk (I installed it under the name Help.com). Happy days...

My favourite was a CMOS design that the analyser s/w (Dracula?) couldn't resolve, and kept throwing up strange error messages. They eventually put it under a microscope and discovered the designer had drawn a picture of a duck in the middle of the circuit, and the analyser was trying to rationalise the connections of the circuit to the drawing...