alt Hacker NewsThere's a middle ground for sure. I've left a few witty comments and loglines in my time.
But I've also had to debug a Delphi unit which returned error codes inspired by the magical supercomputer Hex from the Discworld novels.
"Divide by cucumber error" is not a decent enough representation of a module's internal state, no matter how funny you think you are.
Replies
dotancohen • 06/16/2025
"Divide by cucumber error" sounds like a great string to grep for - so actually helpful for developers to find the place in the code that threw it.
But a wholly non-funny "Invariant Violated" message would be no better. The problem isn't that the message is funny, but that it does not contain the information you need to understand what's going on. The whimsy is just a distraction.