The Daily WTF

My favorite bar in Pittsburgh is a bit of a dive. Like any good dive, the bathroom is covered in the incoherent scrawl of thousands of drunks. It’s a mix of jokes, political flamewars, and just absolute nonsense. My favorite part about it, though, is that it just makes me think about the long history of latrinalia. For as long as there have been humans, we’ve been scribbling on whatever surface was at hand, and a lot of those scribbles have been made while we answer nature’s call.

Programmers have their own form of latrinalia: code comments. They’re frequently vulgar, they’re sometimes comprehensible only to the person who wrote them, and we all like to pretend that they’re more meaningful than they are.

So let’s take a look at a few mysterious scribbles on the bathroom walls of code.

We start with this one, from Johann:

— 8< — do

To read the full article click on the 'post' link at the top.