Are chatty/humorous comments in source code acceptable or unprofessional? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Humor in Documentation

Throughout my professional career, I have often relied on chatty or humorous comments in source code (or source control commit messages) to help break up the tedium of the day or to convey how I felt about the piece of code I was writing. I have always thought that as long as I kept it out of anything a customer can see, it was ok. Recently, I have wondered if they can be distracting to anyone else working on my code, construed as unprofessional, or offer too much room for interpretation. I've worked at some companies with a strict corporate culture and I have never had to answer for such comments, but I would hate to find out that it was throwing someone else off all this time.

So...acceptable or unprofessional? Should they just be avoided?

And, of course, here are some examples (your examples are welcome as well):

try{
    obj.execute();
}catch(SomeException e){
    //squishy, squishy
}

//pretend you didn't see this...
String password = "bananer$";

//I'm under a lot of pressure. I can configure this later. Dont hate me.
//String fp = "C:\Users\scottpa"
String fp = "/usr/local"

and

Commit Comment: I hate when I forget to format!

Answer 1

It's completely a company culture thing. While it may be acceptable (and even encouraged) if you're working at some startups it may not be the best idea to place a dick joke in the middle of a high frequency trading algorithm.

A good judge of whether the comment may be appropriate or not is to ask yourself if you would say it directly to the face of one of your co-workers or a contractor / new hire who you had never met before.

Answer 2

Yes, this is completely unprofessional. Consider the possibility that the company is up for sale, and the code is audited as part of the due diligence process. This makes the company look like it's full of jokers who don't take things seriously (since anyone auditing the code is unlikely to know the developers involved), and may end up costing money.

Answer 3

Yes, those types of comments are unprofessional. Whether unprofessional comments are acceptable is a completely different question. Used very sparingly, most developers think they are fine, even welcome. Use them too much and you will become an object of scorn for constantly imposing your personality on others when they're trying to get work done. It's like telling a joke in a meeting. One is okay. Constantly joking is not.

You can also have fun in a more professional way. For example, when I needed arbitrary coordinates when I was writing automated tests of military aircraft targeting software, I would use the lat and long of my in-laws' house. It didn't affect the code at all, you wouldn't even know it was a house without looking it up, and if you didn't know whose house that was, you wouldn't get the joke.

Answer 4

Unprofessional. About a decade ago, someone leaked some of the source code for windows out into the filesharing networks, and the code contained a lot of profanity in the comments. The profanity and number of unprofessional remarks caused more of a stink than the leak of the code.

Each company is different, and one I worked at as recent as a year ago was very uptight about what appeared in email. One email to other members of my group contained WTF, and when it somehow got forwarded outside our office, I received nastygrams from VPs in other timezones about my profanity.

Answer 5

Agree it's unproffesional. I'd add to the other answers that chattt comments don't get maintained. Ie when the code geta changed at some point in the future the comments probably don't. Especially long comments. At tjat point they are misleading, long and tedious.

Answer 6

Well, I put some jokes in my comments sometimes. People seems to accept it well, including clients who contract us for making code for them. There is, however, one exception: if the humor is related to a problem in the code, it is better to avoid it. A client would rise eyebrows for something like:

// Here I applied workaround oriented programming LOL

but would be more comprehensive to something like:

// TODO This piece demands some refactoring

Said that, I believe humor in code can be unprofessional and childish in a good way, reducing stress of coworkers and even customers, if it follows these guidelines.

Answer 7

“What is funny?” has been discussed by philosophers since at least the 4th century BCE. About the only thing agreed is that it has to be audience appropriate. And as written above—software often has an audience that is almost completely unknown.

Humor yields to the hypothetical…

That said, Knuth uses jokes in his code.

Corollary as a piece of code:

def ShouldIPutJokesInMyCode(name): return(name=="Knuth")

Is this funny?—Oh my.

Answer 8

As has been said several times yes, it is unprofessional. That said, one of the things that as a maintainer of a good sized bit of other people's code one of the things that I often find myself doing is trying to get into the head of the previous programmers, and 'chatty' comments when I find them are much more useful to getting into that previous coder's mindset than finding /* this is an abstract factory builder for an n-tier delegate */ or /* TODO replace */.

Every minute faster that I can get into the mind of that previous coder is a minute more I can spend fixing or extending. If the previous coder was frustrated when writing the code and blowing off steam, I want to know that. Repeating what the code already says (and especially boilerplate comments telling me that /* Foo controller is a singleton */) don't give one bit of insight into what was going on.

Tech and business design docs (when they exist and can be found) are bland and most often for management rather than the code. They don't explain the influences that happen after the docs have been written (and forgotten). The code and the comments are the mind of the programmer.

Don't write anything you wouldn't want your mother to read, or to have show up on a performance review. Do everything you can to help that person five years down the road to understand what you were thinking at the time.

Answer 9

Please don't do it. At least, not if I'm ever going to have to read your source code.

If I'm trying to understand someone else's source code, I read the comments to garner information. Any text that doesn't give me useful information is wasting my time, and has no place being in the source code.

If I want to read jokes while I'm at work, there are plenty of other ways for me to achieve that.

Answer 10

There are situations where it is acceptable, but you should take care. If you google up source codes, it is very common to find these. This one is in the android source code:

/* now check out who it is.  We don't care about mismatched DNS names here,
   but any ADDR and PORT we specified had better fucking well match the caller.
   Converting from addr to inet_ntoa and back again is a bit of a kludge, but
   gethostpoop wants a string and there's much gnarlier code out there already,
   so I don't feel bad.

But If I look to someone else code, I would determine if it is professional or not, not by evaluating the comments, but mainly by evaluating in what point it is in a scale comming from "utter big ball of crap" and "the most ellegant and well-written code I already seen".

To this comes variable and function names; proper use of the OO, functional or whatever relevant pradigm applies to the language; API design; simplicity; elegancy; proper reuse of existing code, etc. If everyone of these is very good, the code is undoubtful very professional even if its comments are not.

The opposite is true too. I personally already saw a horrible behemoth of something like 5000 lines full of code duplication, global vars, variables with random names, without any recogniable structure. The purpose was to parse a date and determine if it was valid or not. To make things worse, it accepted some invalid inputs and rejected some valid ones. Some inputs made it crHowever it was very well documented. So, even if the comments are very professional, I still think that the world would be better if someone killed the author of such horror.