Programmer humor is really cringey. I fully expect to be downvoted for this comment (outside of our cringey humor, we tend to be rather humorless and thin skinned), but so be it.

I have to admit, I would never add such a "feature".

But I think it's funny.

Also sad that this kind of culture is dying with the increasing professionalization of the industry.

I often feel a bit like a pioneer, doing this stuff at home when I was young, having fun and later making a living with it.

Now I meet more and more people who just do it because it pays well.

But what can I say, it still pays to have a passion for your job :)

I would have added this "feature" with a mechanism to detect if it's running inside a TTY. That way, automated tests, pipes or scripts that parse the output wouldn't have this problem.

But seriously, who uses a documentation tool for automated tests every minute? That use case is just insane and out of the scope of man IMHO.

> But seriously, who uses a documentation tool for automated tests every minute?

As someone with a long history of abusing tools and side-effects, I'll defend that. The whole point of the Unix philosophy is small, useful tools that can be composited in ways the creator never anticipated. If it works for them, great. (At least until it isn't.)

But then I also pry with my pocketknife, and you probably don't want to know how about using a mill engine as a come-along...

> But seriously, who uses a documentation tool for automated tests every minute? That use case is just insane and out of the scope of man IMHO.

It seems that it's not being triggered every minute: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man... . (In fact, I can't find, even in the pre-editing version of the post, any reference to it happening every minute; but probably I'm just missing it.)

They also used it without specifying a page.

There was still a true bug because "gimme gimme gimme" appeared when calling "man -w", and that's the command they were using. But I still don't understand how a test could break because of this.

I don't think it is the professionalization of the industry that is making this culture feel less alive, quite the opposite. A lot of the "fun" of such features, or trivia, of past times is that it reflects the work that went into those projects. Today anyone can code up a small script with a clever name and adore it with funny messages and an edgy readme. The meaning of it all, the hard work, the culture and team behind it, the contrast between being serious and funny, and often the funny part itself is lost. Left is mostly a sort joking cargo cult type culture that might even be a hindrance to people trying to make new achievements that will potentially create new cultures, jokes and all.

"Humorless and thin skinned" is an ironic accusation to throw in a comment consisting entirely of bashing someone else's attempt at humour and whining about downvotes.

>a comment consisting entirely of bashing someone else's attempt at humour

Actually, I was being self-critical. Self-awareness is a good thing.

>whining about downvotes

I have no issue with receiving downvotes in this case. "So be it" is a pretty simple phrase. Maybe you're projecting.

This is the thin skinned backlash I expected. Oh well.

I would suggest the backlash would likely be due to the wording of your original comment.

you stated that "Programmer humor is really cringey."

Cringey is generally a negative sentiment and saying "is" implies that this negative sentiment is a generally accepted fact.

I'd suggest that humour is almost entirely subjective, and therefore attempting to suggest that any form of humour is objectively bad makes no real sense.

If you had said "I find programmer humor to be really cringey" you may well have received fewer negative reactions.

Reminder of what I wrote:

>outside of __our__ cringey humor, __we__ tend to be rather humorless and thin skinned

I appreciate you being constructive, but I thought the pronouns I used made it sufficiently clear that I consider myself as a part of this culture (and thus subject to the characterizations I made about programmer humor). Anyway, I do not mind the negative reactions, even though I may reply in disagreement.

Saying that you're part of the culture doesn't really remove the suggested universal negative, it just implies that you feel that you are part of that demographic.

The point I was going for was that I'd suggest that all humor is so subjective that it's impossible for a universal negative to apply.

In the same way that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, humour is in the ear of the listener.

Prefixing everything with "I think" or "I find it to be" is unreasonable. Of course it's subjective, and of course if someone says something is cringey, that's an opinion and it goes without saying.

Being a part of the group I was characterizing means my comment was not from some perceived position of superiority.

Anyway, I knew what I was getting myself into with that post.

well it's a view of the world that adding two words to a sentence is unreasonable, but (and this is just a suggestion) I think you'll find that you get less negative feedback if you make it clear when something is an opinion rather than a statement of fact.

My downvote is not because of our collective sense of humor, but because I deny the notion of millions of people sharing a certain collective sense of humor.

Subcultures are a real thing.

>I deny the notion of millions of people sharing a certain collective sense of humor.

Comedy shows appeal to more than a handful of people. Most humor only works collectively.

> I deny the notion of millions of people sharing a certain collective sense of humor

You don't think there's any such thing as nerd culture?

> You don't think there's any such thing as nerd culture?

Nothing is ever black or white. I'm most certainly a nerd, but that doesn't mean I have the same sense of humor as every other nerd. Think of it like inheritance vs composition. Just because I'm a nerd, doesn't mean I inherit everything other nerds have. I only have some components. And while I appreciate Sci-Fi movies, I don't participate in wars between Star Wars and Star Trek (I think Stargate SG1 was better anyway).

> that doesn't mean I have the same sense of humor as every other nerd

Of course not. Think statistically significant rather than about absolutes.

There is plenty of cringey non-programmer humor.

Of course!

I merely believe that the kind of humor associated with any given group or subculture has its own characteristics (which often reflect the values & norms of the group); and I believe "cringeyness" is characteristic of programmer humor.

Overlaps are possible.

I would argue that I didn't make an especially bold proposition when I said programmer humor was cringey. I knew some would construe it as a verbal application of negative space, as if implying all other humor was strictly superior; but this is not the case.

That would be an appropriate response if you're reviewing newly-checked in code from junior developers, but this has been there for years and if you remove it, you're probably going to break things downstream .. there'd literally be nobody there to hear your prayer.

I'm curious... how would you imagine this might break things downstream?

FWIW I love this kind of stuff and if properly documented would rather work around it than remove it, but nobody relies on my code so what do I know :).

Expect: a tool (from tcl/tk) used to write tests, whether we like it or not.

Expect that "gimme gimme gimme" is a cheap way to determine if the tests are running after midnight, nor not. If so, do more extensive tests; if not, do less burdensome tests.

I know - its lame. But, you cannot predict these things.

If you don't want people to use your Easter egg for something, don't include it in the release.. ;)

As described it only worked if you run it at exactly half-past midnight.

Because dozens of junior engineers have encountered this error before. However, instead of posting on SE about it they added a branch to the test case if it was running after midnight, and at least one of them added an assert to verify the output was "gimme gimme gimme".

I think if you're relying on the presence of an easter-egg in something you're using in production, you probably have bigger problems.

Don't forget the first rule of SW development. If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug. We never EVER blame the user programs.

/s

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

I might suggest that man and the kernel have a different relationship to user programs.

There is no reason the philosophy can't be the same.

No, but there also isn't any particular reason to think it should be.

Chesterton's Fence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...

I really worry when people voice glee about removing code, in particular code they themselves have not put in and may not know the full history off.

It suggests to me that the person is perhaps not the best curator of the code base under their custody.

Removing code is awesome and makes me happy. Sometimes it's hard to know for certain if it's OK to remove, but that illustrates the point.

BTW I like to remove my own code too, assuming it's become obsolete or replaced. My joy in having a clean and performant present-day product trumps any feelings about past efforts and old code.

From context it seemed that the kind of code we're talking about obviously served no real purpose. Most codebases where everyone is afraid to delete anything are unmanageable messes only comprehensible to people who have been working on them for years.

We have invented that really useful thing named version control to know about the history of code.

If yours has commit messages not good enough to properly understand its history, fix that.

Yeah, I have never really felt like it was a good idea to commit stuff like that, or comments with profanity or jokes, or any of that stuff. Who wants to be in the position of explaining that if it breaks or your company gets sued or something?

At the very least it's neither a hotpocket ad, doesn't load an entire dictionary to show the definition of a single word or contains a high resolution picture of guy fiery.