I had a dream the other night that I was in a code review with some of the guys.
For non-geeks amongst you, one of the key things about programming is to write your code in such a way that anybody else who reads it can understand how it works… and indeed so that you yourself can fully understand it when you read it again six months later.
So I was in this code review, and noting some issues with the code. And I said: “Look, I don’t want to single out any particular person, but some of this code… well it appears someone’s named this routine after Peter Brock.
“So we’ve got routine ‘Brocky’ with parameters ‘Peter’, ‘Holden’ and ‘Bathurst’. This makes no sense.”
Strange.
5 replies on “Coding dream”
What a bunch of pansies you work with in your dreams. It might make no sense, but you’ve got to immortalize the big man, don’t you? And those names are way better than X, Y or Z. Unless it’s a 3D coordinate system, like a GIS. But maybe it’s a system to map out Bathurst! Then it all makes sense. Purple monkey dishwasher.
Why do you insist on attributing meaning to your dreams? I’m so much happier with the belief that they’re just the random meanderings of my brain due to lack of external stimulation and being a little too warm.
Was that parameters or Panorama?
I love the premise that our dreams are our past, present and future mashed up into one and shot at our sub-conscious as from a random cannon. I dislike it though when work infiltrates my dream sequence as vividly as Daniel’s… some people I just don’t want to see outside of business hours – even if it is only a dream.
I thought it was impossible for us to “read” in our dreams, because the side of the brain that gives us dreams is not the one that let us read. We only can see graphics but can’t actually read. Weird
Did you dream that the routine was properly documented? :P
What’s odd about my fellow code monkeys is that they’ll happily type out code all day long, but getting them to document what it does is like getting blood from a stone.
In PL/I there’s a structure called a a begin block, which has a label, like…
alabel:begin;
Code, etc
When Israeli leader Menachem Begin died in 1983 I code one like:
MENACHEM:BEGIN;
I’d always wanted to that! Why? Who knows, I don’t!
Cheers
Ron