Anyone else, jokes in your programming comments?

I'm a programmer and a comedian.

I find myself putting jokes in my programming comments.

Plus side, I over comment.

Writing this post because I just had a flashback feel good memory where this project manager at Goodyear read one and told me how he laughed his but off.

I always thought the comm-ents were large anthropomorphic trees that handled processor communications.

I try not to anymore, turns out not everyone has the same sense of humor as me.

A man at a factory I used to work with but not seen for years said to me one day 'you owe me five quid.

Seeing my perplexed look he continued.... we scrapped a machine that you did the panel for and I took the plc out. Written on the back plane was 'if you read this I will pay you 5 pounds, R.O.S.'

It took nearly 20 years for that joke to come to fruition.

I at times have a some of fun writing comments, both partially sane and insane, and I do it mostly for myself.
I think to myself, 'well, this is what I was thinking at the time, and what I wrote then, and read now, is sometimes means something', sometimes cryptic with a slight warpedness about it.
More recently, I'm tending to throw a bit of French in there, not, not that sort of French , real French, probably trying in vane to impress myself in some wacky way.
Thing is, when I can, I am in France, riding through the Aples. And while I am doing that, I often have flashbacks to my other life, programming.
I guess I am trying to live two lives simultaneously, trying to perfect what a good life means, and finding I fumble and stumble in the process.

It is interesting the subject was brought up, I hope it shows that there are a few other out there that find it hard to resist writing from a more other sided hemisphere than would normally be used for logic.

I would love to see some more examples of what people have written in their code ?
Santè

dmroeder said:

I try not to anymore, turns out not everyone has the same sense of humor as me.

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Agreed. I find that a lot of people share 80% of my sense of humor, but are horrified by the other 20%. We start going down the shared humor path, and then BAM, brick wall. Even worse, everyone shares a DIFFERENT 80%. Social dynamics is a horribly complicated venn diagram, trying to keep track of what jokes are OK where.

It pretty much just turns me into a stick-in-the-mud, way easier.

We had a programmer here years ago that programmed a new welding cell.

We did not find this out for years, until a maintenance guy showed me.

Manual control for the welder.

when not pressed. "Initiate Weld"
When pressed. "And then She Ate"

To this day, that is still on the machine. I have not had the heart to remove it.

I've added sarcastic comments to programs done by others.

Once I found a machine that was heavily laden with MEQ, XOR, and MVM instructions. I did finally determine the underlying design, liked it, but could not put enough information in a rung comment to fully explain the concept, so I just wrote "and the MEQ shall inherit the earth." as a page title and went about my rat killing.

In a G3 HMI, you can "PlayRTTTL" music with the little on board beeper. I had one play a song if you held the "Alarm Reset" button down for three seconds. I wanted it to play Boomer Sooner because most of the operators using it were OSU Cowboys fans, but after an hour of searching, I could not find the RTTTL codes for that song. I forgot I had left the code in the HMI to play "Too***y" from the example in the reference manual. It is probably still in there at a previous employer.

On the HMI PLC Inputs and Outputs screens I usually label an unused input as "Self-Destruct PB" and an output "Gelignite Charge", and sometimes add an unused output that comes on on my birthday - especially if there's an output card in slot 8 (August).

This topic reminded me of a thread from a few years back--the first post really made me chuckle:
http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?p=497758

I once, just for the hell of it, put a p/button on a HMI labelled 'DO NOT PRESS' and monitored it, when the machine broke down I asked did anybody press this p/button? A stern "NO definitely not" was the reply.

When I checked It had been pressed 51 times that day.

Steve

I am trying to. Very Trying too.

ganutenator said:

I'm a programmer and a comedian.

I find myself putting jokes in my programming comments.

Plus side, I over comment.

Writing this post because I just had a flashback feel good memory where this project manager at Goodyear read one and told me how he laughed his but off.

Click to expand...

Not mine, but a coworker at a previous job was in the process of adding screens to a Wonderware installation. One of the third shift operators kept installing games on the machine, messing up the whole system. After the third time of this happening, my coworker added a popup window with his picture on it and an audio file of him saying "<operator name>, stop installing games on me" and had it set to trigger 30 minutes into third shift. That solved the problem of game installation.

I hope you paid up!

Ronnie Sullivan said:

A man at a factory I used to work with but not seen for years said to me one day 'you owe me five quid.

Seeing my perplexed look he continued.... we scrapped a machine that you did the panel for and I took the plc out. Written on the back plane was 'if you read this I will pay you 5 pounds, R.O.S.'

It took nearly 20 years for that joke to come to fruition.

Click to expand...

Whenever I have to put unused text elements into an array, or have unused Alarm messages, I don't leave them blank.

Instead, I insert passages of Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky".

While people will ignore or fail to tell you about a blank string or empty error message, they will usually mention it if the machine advises them to "shun the frumious Bandersnatch !".