2026-07-27 00:14 UTC
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.
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@levork@graphics.social 2026-07-27 00:15
Tom Duff is the inventor of the Duff Device, so you can imagine what kind of code he might write. But he also left a comment in the implicit field code which was a quote from the Preface to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, from 1755. That's just who he is. (In a fit of hubris, many years later when I refactored the code, I left an answering comment which was a quote from the Preface to Noah Webster's "An American Dictionary of the English Language. I'm not sure Tom ever noticed this.) (3/10)