OOTS #1243 - The Discussion Thread

[danielxcutter]

This is how Cadderly Bonaduce should have gone out.

I’ll be real I read that last name as Bornadunce for a few seconds.

[Doug Lampert]

I have myself done this.
In my defence, i'm not a professional.

Back when I was an undergraduate I had a bit of code that did some very complicated things with indexes to run a 3-D interpolator (relatively) quickly and efficiently with only about 8 executable lines.

I wrote the code, looked at it, and wrote a comment that basically said, "This code will never be understood by anyone including me as of a few months from now, leave it as is or just rewrite it."

[Gusion]

I’ll be real I read that last name as Bornadunce for a few seconds.

Ah well blame Salvatore for that one.

[bunsen_h]

Back when I was an undergraduate I had a bit of code that did some very complicated things with indexes to run a 3-D interpolator (relatively) quickly and efficiently with only about 8 executable lines.

I wrote the code, looked at it, and wrote a comment that basically said, "This code will never be understood by anyone including me as of a few months from now, leave it as is or just rewrite it."

I had a somewhat similar experience when I was writing my M.Sc. thesis. I wrote a TeX macro that would take a file name as an argument, then read the file and convert it into a formatted table of the data in the file. It had to do iteration to support tables with more columns than the usual maximum for TeX tables. I spent two days with my brain completely immersed in the problem, and when I emerged, I knew that I would never understand it again.

[pendell]

Speaking as a senior software engineer, while I maintain close to a hundred pages on the project wiki and am constantly curating it for accuracy in addition to the work I'm actually paid for, I look askance at commenting code.

The reason is simple: As a rule, if someone can't write clear code , they can't write clear documentation either. So what "commented" code means is thousands of lines of boiler plate of the form

/**
*
* This method executes smerdlyfoo
* Pre-conditions: N/A
* Post-conditions: N/A
* @param: int a the a value
* @param: int b the b value
* @return: N/A
*/
public void smerdlyfoo (int a, int b) {

}

For every one line of declaration you have six or seven lines of boilerplate that doesn't tell you any more than the original method declaration did. What's worse, the people who [silly] out this boilerplate don't bother to maintain it, so not only is it a bunch of cruft in the code base but it can be actively misleading. Which normally isn't a problem, because the same people who phone in their code comments don't read them either. It's only people who take maintainability seriously or those who actually try to make use of the comments who suffer .

Mind: I DO think code comments have a place but the very very first lesson is to be able to communicate clearly in ANY medium. A person who can write clean code can also embellish it with concise , useful documentation. A person who can't write code clearly won't be able to make things better with comments. That becomes 10x worse when you're dealing with an offshore team which is much, much more fluent in Java or Python than they are in English. In such cases, I greatly prefer 1) Tight, well-written code 2) Comprehensive unit tests as secondary documentation 3) Code comments in a distant third place after the other two.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[after5cst]

Speaking as a senior software engineer...

+1. On pretty much all of it. (Especially boilerplate documentation). A brief look at a couple decades of programming:

I once believed code comments were a waste of programmer time.

I then believed code comments were essential.

I then believed that code comments should express the "why", not the "what" (those were a waste of time).

I then believed that if you needed code comments to explain the "why" the code needs to be better.

I now believe many things, including:

• Absolutes frequently aren't.
• My own learning journey continues, and hopefully will until I die.

[Dion]

I then believed that code comments should express the "why", not the "what" (those were a waste of time).

When I started coding, comments were more important because comments were usually all you had for traceability. Anything you wanted to know about the history of a piece of code - who wrote it, why they wrote it, what problem it tried to solve, when they wrote it, how they tested it, etc. - was generally only available in the comments.

But in many development environments today, code metadata is linked to the code through other tools, and you can trace each piece of code from requirements through testing without some poor schmuck manually putting it in the comments.

Tooling has made many of the traditional use for code comments obsolete.

There are still a small number of places I still like to see comments, but I find that a big part of developer maturity is (1) learning all the places where a future developer will need comments to fix, modify, or extend the code, and (2) learning the best ways to minimize the number of places that communication has to happen.

[tcrudisi]

Every day I have come back to this site to check on a new comic, I have re-read 1243 - Rogue Up, Rogue Down. Normally I might re-read an OotS strip once. This time? Haley is just so freaking awesome that I re-read it every time.

[JSSheridan]

Thanks Giant!

[Gusion]

New comic is up.

Oh, I forgot my prediction for 1244. Sunny is so shocked he turns center eye on Haley again - technically just continuing to follow directions - which also dispels Serini's invisibility. Someone recognizes her and everyone is like oh hey wtf.

I'm going to guess Elan, because even if he isn't the smartest of the group that just seems like a Bard thing to do.

[Ionathus]

Oh, I forgot my prediction for 1244. Sunny is so shocked he turns center eye on Haley again - technically just continuing to follow directions - which also dispels Serini's invisibility. Someone recognizes her and everyone is like oh hey wtf.

I'm going to guess Elan, because even if he isn't the smartest of the group that just seems like a Bard thing to do.

Agreed -- I think Sunny's AMF eye would be a cool moment for revealing Serini to the Order.

And if they realize who she is...do you think an armor-piercing question might be the thing that stops the fight?

Something tells me Serini isn't down and out yet. Well, she IS down, but...you get what I mean

[Gusion]

Agreed -- I think Sunny's AMF eye would be a cool moment for revealing Serini to the Order.

And if they realize who she is...do you think an armor-piercing question might be the thing that stops the fight?

I'll go with... not the question itself, but a reveal from Belkar. "OH, HEY. You're that chick Shojo told me he hooked up with... why are you here, he thought you were dead?"

And she'll be like wait wtf. And it'll turn out they were lovers (would their kid be a three-quarterling?) before Xykon make her a three-eigthling and she never saw him again but always still loved him and it just distracts her from wanting to kill them for a moment long enough to have a conversation... which enables them to somehow persuade her to stop fighting and rejoin with the pallies.

Just a wild ass guess though. Which now Rich will absolutely NOT do this.

[Ruck]

I'll go with... not the question itself, but a reveal from Belkar. "OH, HEY. You're that chick Shojo told me he hooked up with... why are you here, he thought you were dead?"

And she'll be like wait wtf. And it'll turn out they were lovers (would their kid be a three-quarterling?) before Xykon make her a three-eigthling and she never saw him again but always still loved him and it just distracts her from wanting to kill them for a moment long enough to have a conversation... which enables them to somehow persuade her to stop fighting and rejoin with the pallies.

Just a wild ass guess though. Which now Rich will absolutely NOT do this.

I definitely doubt that will happen, because it's completely unnecessary for it to happen for the Order to recognize Serini, because it doesn't add anything to the story for this to be the reason the Order recognizes Serini, and because Rich has expressed frustration with how readers sexualize his female characters. (Can't find the quote now, but it's definitely in relation to the BRITF-era discussion that Laurin's favor from Tarquin would involve sex.)

[hamishspence]

I definitely doubt that will happen, because it's completely unnecessary for it to happen for the Order to recognize Serini, because it doesn't add anything to the story for this to be the reason the Order recognizes Serini, and because Rich has expressed frustration with how readers sexualize his female characters. (Can't find the quote now, but it's definitely in relation to the BRITF-era discussion that Laurin's favor from Tarquin would involve sex.)

This was it:

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the original "joke" in this thread was a stretch, considering the only thing she has in common with a "Airborne Tramp" is…nothing. No, literally—nothing. She has been depicted as neither flying nor sexually promiscuous, and those are the only two words in the original reference. The only thing she has in common with any of the characters Haley was referring to with the original joke was that she is female, which means that as far as the OP goes, being female is enough to prompt the mental association. That's not really OK.

Laurin is a female character probably in her late 50's who is covered from head to toe and has never discussed anything sexual at all. I made a deliberate effort to not sexualize her, even, since I realized a while ago that I was subconsciously "sexing up" almost all of the female characters. The fact that she still rates these kind of comments is very disappointing.

Regarding Haley's fairly persistent slut-shaming…all I can do is apologize for that. I have no excuse except my own shortcomings and lack of self-awareness. I could try to say that because of the environment that Haley was raised in (a literal criminal gang), she hasn't had the education or experience to not fall in line and perpetuate those sort of harmful labels on her own gender. I could say that, but that would be justifying it after the fact. The truth is, I didn't think it was a problem at the time. I've known so many women (many in the lower class, like Haley) who would drop those insults at other women in a fight that I was just trying to add authenticity. In my experience, some women are quicker to slut-shame other women than even men. So I was going for accuracy in how a woman might insult other women, but you know what? It's still not acceptable. I'm still producing a piece of media consumed by young women, and I have a responsibility to do better.

Does this mean that those words will never show up in anything I write ever again? Probably not, but at least in the future I hope to only use them when I'm depicting a character who is overtly sexist/misogynistic (like Tarquin), rather than having them flow out of the mouth of the primary female lead. Because what kind of message does that send? I may be wrong, but I think I've avoided Haley using any of those words for this entire book. I just didn't want to draw attention to it.

[danielxcutter]

This probably isn't the point, but I wonder how much of that was due to Laurin being a caster-type? She may not have been able to fly - good flight powers are surprisingly uncommon for psionic manifesters - but don't high-level casters fly a lot?

Honestly I wasn't around at that point so I dunno how I'd think about it. Then again, Haley didn't even speak to Laurin, so probably not.

[Liquor Box]

Oh, I forgot my prediction for 1244. Sunny is so shocked he turns center eye on Haley again - technically just continuing to follow directions - which also dispels Serini's invisibility. Someone recognizes her and everyone is like oh hey wtf.

I'm going to guess Elan, because even if he isn't the smartest of the group that just seems like a Bard thing to do.

Where would the recognise her from - has anyone seen her?

[MoiMagnus]

Oh, I forgot my prediction for 1244. Sunny is so shocked he turns center eye on Haley again - technically just continuing to follow directions - which also dispels Serini's invisibility. Someone recognizes her and everyone is like oh hey wtf.

I'm going to guess Elan, because even if he isn't the smartest of the group that just seems like a Bard thing to do.

I don't think they need to "recognise" her.
She's not an goblinoid or an undead, which is probably enough for a "wtf, why are you helping Xykon?". And it might be enough for one of the members of the OOTS to think "wait, maybe she's the guardian of this gate, let's talk to her and explain that we're allied!".

[danielxcutter]

I mean, how many people are they expecting to be at this Gate? An old halfling in the place where Serini built a Gate? Why wouldn't you wonder if it's Serini?

[Ruck]

Well, we got our answer.

[KorvinStarmast]

Well, we got our answer.

And plenty of laughs.