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Overnight Video: Jonathan Coulton, Nobody Loves You Like Me

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First As Tragedy, Then As Farce3/02/2012 8:10:40 am PST

re: #265 Obdicut

I had to tell a software manager once not to tell his employees “Comment your code so we know what the hell you were doing once you get fired”.

The reason you must comment your code is because otherwise Future_You is eventually going to be strongly motivated to spend the rest of your life building a time machine solely for the purpose of coming back to kick Present-Day_You in the nuts.

It’s really easy to get into the mindset of thinking, “pffft, I know what I’m doing and this is trivial anyway. Anyone should be able to just read it and understand what’s going on”. Then, a year later you need to revisit it for whatever reason, and you are completely mystified as to what the flippin’ fuck you were doing, why you did it that convoluted way as opposed to some vastly more intuitive way, etc. Then you spend half a day “simplifying” it, all the while patting yourself on the back for having improved your skill so much since then, only to remember the hard way why the simple way wasn’t useful the first time around. It really does make you want to go back and slap the piss out of yourself.

Now, the thought of someone else having to suffer through the enigmatic undocumented spaghetti code you leave behind after being fired? That’s hilarious.