A Different Kind of “Code Smell”
First, let’s look at a new ad for Axe body spray…
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
I think the suggestion in the ad goes double if you start pointing out what’s wrong with the code (“you == understand.this? get as an object name? Couldn’t they have hired a real programmer to write the ad copy?”).
359 is the new 555
Fictitious phone numbers on many TV shows and movies begin with the number 555, which I presume is to avoid the legal hassles that arise when people try to call those numbers (I remember that a number of people whose phone numbers were actually 867-5309 had their phones ringing day and night when Tommy Tutone’s song Jenny became a hit).
The people behind the TV show CSI: Miami probably wanted to avoid similar legal trouble in an episode where an IP address was shown onscreen. I don’t think I’d go to the trouble of portscanning some IP address I’d seen on a fiction TV show, but somewhere, out there, someone just might. Hence their invention of an IP address whose first “octet” is 359. It’s IPv4.5!
And finally, here’s a graphic that I whipped up for an article with links to recent articles on version control on the Tucows Developer Blog:
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The funny thing about that ad is that they explicitly made it so that non-programmers would understand it (just by reading the text and ignoring the punctuation). Amazingly, a programmer might have a harder time understanding it than a lay person. A programmer would have written something like this:
if(you.understand(this)) {
you.get(girlfriend);
}
…which, semantically, means something completely different to a non-programmer than a programmer.
Surely branch 2a should be Deep Space 9?
@Tom: Dang! Looks like I pasted in the wrong image. I should fix that.
Thanks for the heads-up, Tom!
@Tom: Fixed!