in reply to Does Humor Belong in Programming?

It depends. A little levity is fine. Doing so at expense of clear/readable code is not. If I have to debug some code with 'comedy' variable names I will get quite grumpy about it, for all the reasons I'd get grumpy if you just used single letters all the way through.

But in comments (as long as you _also_ include the comments that you _need_) it's fine and great. In error/diag messages too (again, provided you're actually producing _useful_ output as well).

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Re^2: Does Humor Belong in Programming?
by stevieb (Canon) on Oct 12, 2015 at 19:59 UTC

    This is pretty well my stance. Variable names, sub names or anything that is functional should not be comedic unless the comedic name truly represents what is being used.

    For comments, comedic things are fun to read in odd/rare circumstances, and very far edge case warnings as well (so long as the warn/error displays useful info inclusive).

    I once patched a module that had a comment such as:

    # we don't even know how why this is here, 
# nor how it is ever executed, Scotty

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    I looked at the code after I found that a far away test on CPAN Testers was failing, and realized that this sub was being called ONLY in a test and was never used otherwise. So I fixed the test, wrote a new test, and in the sub in the patch wrote something to the effect:

    # this sub isn't ever used; beam it up, Scotty

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Re^2: Does Humor Belong in Programming?
by FloydATC (Deacon) on Oct 12, 2015 at 07:45 UTC
    Also, less is more.

    -- FloydATC

    Time flies when you don't know what you're doing

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