2026-07-27 00:13 UTC
Replies (5)
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@levork@graphics.social 2026-07-27 00:14
I've been in this code base for 26+ years and I can recognize the author of many chunks simply by looking at indentation, comments, or coding style. And I can often map style to personality quirks of the author. Dan McCoy's code for converting general polyhedra from 1990 still survives today. Probably one of the few pieces of code left that actually has a "for ( ; l; l = l->next)" loop for linked lists. Dan is also the only person I've ever seen use the abbreviation R.N.G in comments. (2/10)
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@mayazimmerman@gamedev.lgbt 2026-07-27 07:01
@levork@graphics.social I don't leave many comments in my games' code, mostly stuff in init so people modding know how to goof with it easily, but there's funny comments here and there. If I can make variable names portmanteaus or funny abbreviations, I always do. I have a lookup table in one of my games that's just named silly_table. You can accuse my code of being unserious spaghetti and maybe it is, but it's my recipe.
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@aras@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-07-27 07:44
@levork@graphics.social same for non-code things, like AI writing — completely devoid of any personality or charm or quirks
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@riley@toot.cat 2026-07-27 08:04
@levork@graphics.social That's not actually genAI fault. That's a problem that arose a couple of decades ago, when businessbros started to think that programmers should behave like the machines that they read in Taylorism textbooks about, and advocated or even enforced personality-less code.
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@patterfloof@meow.social 2026-07-27 14:54
@levork@graphics.social generated code could never have comments of "I'm leaving this function here, nothing uses it any more but the customer will want this functionality back in a few weeks, so don't delete it"