1695: Code Quality 2

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Code Quality 2

Title text: It's like you tried to define a formal grammar based on fragments of a raw database dump from the QuickBooks file of a company that's about to collapse in an accounting scandal.

Explanation

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This comic is a follow-up to 1513: Code Quality, with Ponytail doing some code review again.

Ponytail takes farther jabs at Cueball's code quality by making more metaphors to various things that suggest the code being very messy.

Transcript

Side view of Ponytail sitting at a computer in all five panels.

First panel, tall vertical.
Ponytail: Ugh, I hate reading your code.
Offscreen: I know, I know.

Second panel is wider, shows her in an office chair.
Ponytail: It's like you ran OCR on a photo of a Scrabble board from a game where Javascript reserved words counted for triple points.

Third panel zooms in and shows just her head.
Ponytail: It looks like someone transcribed a naval weather forecast while woodpeckers hammered their shift keys, then randomly indented it.

Fourth panel, similar to second, though slightly narrower.
Ponytail: It's like an e e cummings poem written using only the usernames a website suggests when the one you want is taken.

Fifth panel zooms in, shows her head and the screen.
Ponytail: This looks like the output of a Markov bot that's been fed bus timetables from a city where the buses crash constantly.
Offscreen: Whatever, it runs fine for now.
Ponytail: So does a burning bus.

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Discussion

Edward Estin Cummings was a poet (pseudonym e e cummings) who used capitalization, punctuation, and line breaks in unconventional ways. When a new user creates an account that duplicates an existing user name, many websites will suggest a user name with the user's first name followed by a string of digits. The Dining Logician (talk) 14:42, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I really love these ones :) I hope there will be a part 3. Can we please make a contest for these?162.158.83.246 15:22, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes please! How about:

"It's as if you used a kaleidoscope while following a style-guide written in Rongorongo & applied a pseudo-random number generator to the Unicode table for all your regular expressions. Also, you're not supposed to use line-breaks to draw letters using pipe symbols when defining your variables." (A nice example of the Reverse Boustrophedon format used in Rongorongo) 162.158.68.137 22:05, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

My brother made up this one: "It's as if you ran a sponge through a punch-card reader." --172.69.42.50 00:10, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

I know Ponytail is female but I keep reading her voice as TJ Miller's character from the movie Deadpool.--R0hrshach (talk) 15:45, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Are you also a fan of Dr. Mrs. The Monarch, from Venture Bros? 162.158.68.137 22:05, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

"This is further compounded by Ponytail's suggestion that Cueball made rampant use of JavaScript reserved words in his declarations, which is strictly forbidden by the language." I don't think Ponytail made any such suggestion. I think all Ponytail is suggesting is that reserved words occur more often than they would in an ordinary scrabble game. A "house rule" giving triple points for using particular words would explain their high frequency.

Of course in pretty much any program reserved words do occur with high frequency, it's hard to write without them. There is also heavy overlap in the list of reserved words in different languages, so that the program might not be in javascript. A typical C program uses lots of javascript reserved words.--108.162.218.59 16:12, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I agree, and as "the program runs fine for now" it appears to be at the very least a syntactically correct program. --141.101.104.76 21:17, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I also agree that it's highly speculative to assume that Cueball's use of reserved words is necessarily erroneous; However, that may be the funnier interpretation, as it indicates an even higher level of improper usage. 162.158.68.137 22:05, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I interpreted it quite differently: that he uses variable names very similar to reserved words. For example, "stririg" or "strlng" for a string. 173.245.52.70 11:12, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Do we really need the "funny bus crash" photos in the transcript?141.101.98.123 20:01, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

"Funny" bus crash is redundant, in my antisocial opinion. 162.158.68.137 22:05, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

No we do not need them. Feel free to delete them. They are though not in the transcript (where they would for sure not belong). The transcript shoudl genreally have no links. They are in the explanation above the transcript as is also the case with the crash photos. --Kynde (talk) 14:43, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

"It works fine for now" is the reason we still have such a hard time figuring out genetics.172.68.35.83 05:57, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Somehow the "OCR on the photo of a Scrabble board" line reminded me of 1685: Patch. Tepples (talk) 22:43, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Much shorter insult, courtesy StackOverflow: "The garbage collector is broken". "What? Impossible!" "Surely. Your program is still there." 162.158.201.84 08:37, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

"Navy weather forecast"

The link given in the explanation to a navy weather forecast is to a graphical weather forecast product. This doesn't make sense, since Randall was clearly referring to a textual weather forecast product. I believe the type of weather forecast Randall intended to reference is an aviation weather forecast, which is textual, not graphical, and is indecipherable to a lay person (pilots must learn how to read them during their training). An example of such a forecast is the blue text on this page explaining how to decode them —SaxTeacher (talk) 14:14, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

In the 1st panel her hands are on desk but others are on the drawer underneath :) 108.162.245.50 20:36, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

That's easily explained away as she is also hunched over in panel 1 trying to read his code. Holding onto the desk like that would make sense as she would not currently be using her hands to type and correct things (not that it's possible to correct Cueball's code). 108.162.241.118 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Cummings example

I wish we could copy over the "Buffalo Bill's" quote box from E. E. Cummings, but sadly we don't have Template:quote box or <poem> available on this wiki... Maplestrip (talk) 15:31, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Would {{Quote}} (Template:Quote) be useful to you? Or just use the "space-starting line" format

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
        who used to
        ride a watersmooth-silver
                                  stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                  Jesus 
he was a handsome man
                      and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

There's various possible treatments. With perhaps some additional arguments to it all, if you want it 'side-aligned'/text-flow-past/whatever, which might also be a template option, or possible through direct xhtml-type markup. Not sure how much you want to exactly emulate it what's over there... 162.158.74.119 23:35, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Something like this..?

Using float
In a table
Or a different div-style block
If you don't need tables
to do weird stuff...
172.70.85.77 17:11, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I think a side-aligned little box would be nicer, as then it wouldn't completely break up the explanation. I simply wouldn't want the example of a E.E. Cummings poem to be taking up more space than the two paragraphs in the same section already do. But the exact styling can be anything, of course. Maplestrip (talk) 14:01, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

This is pretty good! I implemented something with this and I think it works. Couldn't figure out how to stop this from being in bold (I know it's the th fault but I don't know how to fix it), but I think it's already good enough to be on the page. Thanks for the help! Maplestrip (talk) 12:40, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

I hope you like how I changed it. Took a few tweaks to make it right (more than a few Previews, but also changed mind over submitted 'final' versions).

It doesn't need to be a table (the above was designed for contextual use that you don't need to invoke). Yes, the 'th' (table header cell) defaults to bold, and other formatting, where 'td' (table data cell) does not. I should have TDed most rows, if not all, in the example. But not using either now, so doesn't matter.

While it somewhat satisfies me, I don't know if it works for you (or others). And there are several other ways of rendering it (and encoding the rendering) that do the same sort of thing. Never mind someone going so far as to writing a Template:poem and putting the working code (and a ton of wikicode, to deal with optional changes) into that. 172.70.86.16 15:48, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

(sorry for the late response) This looks great! I think this is a really nice format. I'm not big on the font, but it being monospace probably helps and I don't know what the original poem's font was. You did a great job, thank you very much ^_^ ..I do have to say that I absolutely do not get the appeal of this Cummings poem. It does vaguely remind me of badly-indented code :p Maplestrip (talk) 09:38, 3 April 2024 (UTC)