And if he isn't "annoying Steve" now he will be known as that soon enough :)

> "DEBUG 1", "DEBUG 2"

If you use language expressions that automatically become file/line info, that frees you from juggling unique labels. Then it can be saved into your IDE as a insertable code snippet.

It goes without saying that a real interactive debugger session is even better, but it isn't always convenient or possible.

Came for me with an ad for supposedly an in-ear hearing aid. Of course it's such a whispering device. You can't fool me!

I've worked with systems that were so utterly and entirely broken that the only way I could confirm that a particular code path was followed was by inserting an infinite loop and observing that the system then hung instead of crashing.

Combine that with a build system that is so utterly and entirely broken that the only way to be sure is to do a fresh checkout each time, and with a hardware set-up that involves writing the binary onto flash memory and plugging it into a device that is located under somebody else's desk in another room and then perhaps you have the Debugging Cycle From Hell.

I made a website for a goat breading society. It played screaming goat sounds if you typed the Konami code. I was sad the day that site was replaced.

Well indeed, I could have said, "this is why I enjoy working in a mature environment". .NET just happens to be my experience.

The point I was trying to make is that you shouldn't be print debugging in 2024.

I wish it was true

My experience in cpp is 5 times worse than in .net

I still haven’t found a good way of debugging async code that also has timing restrictions…

.., the world runs off print statements sprinkled throughout by a very frustrated and angry developer

Does the GP comment claim that other languages cannot have similar quality of tooling? Why reply with a swipe?

you can configure the breakpoint to log stuff to the console, instead of breaking

Why is "bad", "workaround" and "hard-coded" are on the list of blacklisted words? Sounds kind of dystopian; just because you forbid a word from the dictionary or remove it, it does not solve the underlying issue.

I remember reading a great story about someone doing embedded development who was doing something like download firmware onto a device and being told "Checksum is bad"...

After much checking it was realised that this was because the checksum literally was 0xBAD....

In some places, those lists are even more extensive as they include transliterations of profanities in all the various languages the product is ever localized in.

Sometimes this leads to embarrassing issues. I remember one case where a Chinese guy named Hui was unable to make a blog post on his team's official public blog. Turned out that his name was on the list of banned words because of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%85%D1%83%D0%B9#Russian

What "reputation"? He's disliked by a very loud minority, the rest of us don't care. I will take someone like Poettering who's actively solving decades-long problems over a useless "professional" any day of the week. He's effective because of his bullish personality.

Based only on your post I'm confused. You better a person for including "weird shit" in an error message. But the on a pubic forum tell them "fuck you".

On the basis of profanity alone, your action seems far worse than their's?

The larger WTF here is a developer thinking that Linux having audio problems is weird.

This seems so fragile and prudish. I can't imagine having any other reaction beyond chuckling and moving on

Yea, I have seen a very inappropriate debug statement being left in the led to the dev being promptly fired.

“Western Digital” was replaced with “Woodly Doodly” on the srp. Not really thag embarassing but I am sure WD didn’t appreciate it

Listen. If it’s never supposed to happen then you definitely want a customer to tell you if it happens. Best way to make sure that happens is to insult their mum. It’s just good engineering discipline.

I write alot of #![no_std] code in Rust and forgetting debug messages is luckily impossible because compiler won’t compile in the end if you forget something.

I did this once with the deliberate intention that be traceable. Holding down a few keys while clicking on a specific small set of pixels in an application we were developing for a customer would produce a specific message that was attributable to me personally. I did this sort of thing in most things I worked on back then, partially as a "calling card" and partially as a means of being able to prove my involvement in a given product if the need ever arose. This saved our bacon when a sales rep sent an "evaluation" copy of the nearly completed product to the customer, without authorization, that consisted of our entire source tree. (This was the 1990s and we were running MS-DOS, no file security)

Suddenly the customer tells us they have "repurposed" an "internally developed program" and they cancel our contract. The sales rep was upset that he would not be getting a commission on the sale and mentioned that he had "even sent them a demo", which led to the discovery of what had happened. My boss and I went to the customer's site to "finalize the paperwork", and when we were shown the application (which had extremely minor UI changes) I checked if the hidden click spot still worked, and it did! The customer was horrified. My boss was outraged.

We ended up getting paid the full contract amount plus a large bonus in exchange for agreeing not to sue. The sales rep decided to leave voluntarily rather than be fired.

Yes, but you can check for "DO NOT SUBMIT" with automation.

You can't automate checking for random strings, right?

> > "DO NOT SUBMIT"

> Kinda verbose, ain't it?

I always used the word "doberman" for this purpose. I've never written code for a project that legitimately included the name of a dog variety. A simple grep for "doberman" in the production release CI pipeline catches it. If one ever did slip thru I figured it wouldn't be too offensive to anybody.

I use xyzzy

- Nothing happens

- Easy to find string in code, output, wherever

XXX is already highlighted by most editors by default (or at least mine) and seems suitable. Any comment to be committed to a shared branch should probably contain more specifics and not contain that, if you wanted to institute a policy.

I use the strings "XXX" and "999" for this (the latter because you sometimes need a dummy value in a numeric context), and have a global git hook which stops me committing a changeset which includes them.

I occasionally need to override the hook, for example when using mktemp -t, or when some floating-point data actually contains a run of 9s. But mostly, it is quite specific at catching stuff that shouldn't be checked in.

It's about writing code that your peers can read. "DO NOT SUBMIT" is clear as day. "ASDFASD" probably does not mean "this is a debugging string" to most people.

Not really? it’s close to the minimum string you’d be okay with never actually wanting to commit. Never had a problem with it in logs, but it could be in a comment next to the log if you did. Easy enough to add a shortcut for if you really have a problem typing it out, but at my typing speed my brain has always been the bottleneck, not the number of characters.

I worked on a codebase that had a special logging function with a name like NoPushLog that was just a direct wrapper of the base log function. A githook checked that this string was not in pushed code.

This solves many of the concerns raised in this thread about readability, automation, avoiding typos in the magic string.

The tricky thing you have to solve is how to push the code that defines the custom logging function, but there are solutions.

I use "NOMERGE" plus the habit of grepping for it before I merge a branch.

"GOT_HERE_1"

They pay you enough that you'll respect the need to be professional and write "DO NOT SUBMIT" over "ASDFASD" or similar.

Belt and suspenders.

Every line was reviewed but that doesn’t mean it would be caught every time. And if it’s automatable to catch things like this it should be.

I feel like given the industry, they should have a higher tolerance for slightly spicy placeholder images?

Wanted to make this comment, scrolled in anxious anticipation hoping no one else had made it yet, sadness washes over me.

MEOW fits in 4 bytes and the string is probably aligned on 4-bytes boundary (being at the start of the reference) So probably not a bad choice for a binary protocol.

I usually go with "coucou" or "prout", French for "hello" and "<fart sound>", respectively. When I'm fed up I use "merde".

And for fine and trace logging, you've got bananana, banananana, etc.

I spent years working on open source and I disagree. Politely nudging bugs is fine. Sometimes things fall through the cracks, and a quick prod will get someone's attention to take the time to go fix it. We do actually want to fix bugs for our users, after all. It is very easy to nudge bugs impolitely, so do this with extreme caution, but I don't think Bill stepped over the line in that issue.

Yes, he and you should not be downvoted, I agree, I fully understand how one can want to never be bothered by others playfulness.

But I'm in the team that software is made by people, and that should be reflected. Jokes, like always, must be respectful to strangers, and strangers have to be polite and allow others to express themselves, jokes are not a trap.

There definitely should be jokes in man and grep, it's just have to be of good taste (this one was good). We're not in a high stake diplomatic field. Removing all the jokes by principle is just giving in to the great consensus leveler that crushes humanity. Embrace humanity, don't crush it.

Is man not user facing?

or the humorous reason not to bother. :)

(lol, this is not a mission critical, internet connected system)

> in a hypothetical scenario a hacker needs to fix the production system of a hospital after a major disaster but needs to look up the docs for a command aaand... "gimme gimme gimme" shows up. No internet either.

I thought the easter egg only occurs when man is called without arguments.

>but in a hypothetical scenario a hacker needs to fix the production system of a hospital after a major disaster but needs to look up the docs for a command aaand... "gimme gimme gimme" shows up.

What obligation does a developer/maintainer have in this situation? If the hospital is using free/open source code, it's on them to understand how it works and how to fix it.

this ain’t the movies bruv

Then fork it and maintain it yourself, that's the beauty.

You need to report to lizard HQ to get your personality simulator recalibrated immediately. You are risking exposing all of us.

>Claiming that liking Easter eggs is the essence of humanity is a pretty extreme exaggeration.

Claiming that the parent claimed that easter eggs are "the essence of humanity" is an extreme exaggeration.

Agreed. I'm really trying but failing to come up with a non-screwed-up scenario where this Easter egg legitimately breaks a well-planned testing suite.

I guess you could have an integration test that validates that your installer puts the man pages in a directory that man searches in? It's a bit far-fetched but also not entirely outlandish.

Absolutely, if you’re precious about it review the code, remove the lines, and away you go.

Your pipeline will error with an unexpected result from man, you can grep the man code for “gimme” and remove it in 2 minutes, far quicker than reading a man page.

I miss the Linux world of the 90s before all the money grabbers came. I accept I’m in a tiny minority, and that would be fine. Sadly corporate interests overwhelm the ecosystem now.

You can have, and share, opinions about a thing without feeling that you're 'entitled' to have it conform to your wishes! I'll take it or leave it, but I'll also feel free to say what I think about it (within bounds of politeness and decency).

I wonder how many paid for Linux distributions patched this out? As surely they have reviewed all pieces of code for exactly this sort of malicious behaviour.

I have skepticism for anything that has a free/paid tier. The reduced functionality version has typically been gimped in a way that doesn't make much sense. You end up with cases where the button for the paid functionality is just missing so users don't even know that the thing is possible... and other such problems. It ends up feeling rather 1984. But I'd respect a maintainer who had a paid tier which differed in some kind of goofy way:

- the free version does something goofy at 11:11, but works fine otherwise

- the paid version is identical to the free version, but it doesn't do anything goofy at 11:11

Of course it would be trivial to just do this:

    if time.now() == time(hours=11, minutes=11):
        sleep(60)
        freeversion()

But if you've got a pipeline which absolutely must not fail then you should probably be paying the maintainer. Hacking around the easter egg would hopefully feel enough like an admission of guilt to just talk your boss into paying.

I didn’t mean to imply you personally aim to punish others, but that we should collectively strive to foster a culture of positivity rather than instilling fear of offending others, until people say nothing at all anymore (or say a lot that doesn’t mean anything).

I completely agree with the first sentence - however I would argue that normal, level-headed and sane person either laughs or just shrugs and moves on if that particular joke is not to their taste.

I don't know what your point is.

Yes, Google is a corporation and yes, Google tries to build a product people want to use.

(Building things that people like is a good thing.)

I'm sure some companies use easter eggs as marketing/recruiting tools.

That said, I've put a small number of user-facing easter eggs in publicly-traded MegaCorp code before. In every case, it was an inside joke among devs that the higher-ups never knew about it. The C-Suite is uptight and we definitely would have been reprimanded if they were aware.

Presumably if the T&C didn't have a severability clause the impossible soul capturing part could be argued to invalidate the entirety.

No, it’s the fact that someone is joking in the ToS, proves that no-one can take it seriously. It would require a phrase like “If any term is considered invalid, it doesn’t invalidate the others”, but even this sentence is not always applicable.

> please get the perspective..

There are certainly different points of view here.

I'd immediately take the easter egg out because I just assume if I hear about a bug once, I'm going to hear about it again. The selfish reason to fix any bug ASAP: it's an easy way to make life easier for my future self.

And yeah, also, why fuckup someone else's tests needlessly.

> I will raise a glass of wine for the good impressions of whoever at 0:30am is taking care of automated tests instead of a glass of wine.

Automated tests.