Magic numbers Memes

Posts tagged with Magic numbers

The Oddly Specific Documentationless Magic Number

The Oddly Specific Documentationless Magic Number
You know you're in deep when someone asks about that random if (count > 37) sitting in the codebase like an ancient artifact. "Historical reasons" is developer-speak for "I have absolutely no idea why this exists, the person who wrote it left the company 5 years ago, and I'm too terrified to touch it because production hasn't exploded yet." That nervous side-eye says it all. Why 37? Why not 36 or 38? Was it a business requirement? A bug fix? Someone's lucky number? The universe may never know. The comment "nobody knows why 37" is both brutally honest and professionally devastating. It's the coding equivalent of archaeological mystery—except instead of ancient civilizations, it's just Dave from 2015 who didn't believe in documentation. Pro tip: If you ever find yourself writing code with magic numbers, leave a comment. Future you (or the poor soul who inherits your code) will thank you. Or at least won't curse your name during 3 AM debugging sessions.

When Clean Code Principles Go Too Far

When Clean Code Principles Go Too Far
Someone's been reading Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" a bit too religiously! Instead of using normal array indexes like a sane person, they've created named constants for the values 0, 1, 2, and 3. It's like wearing a three-piece suit to take out the trash—technically more formal but completely unnecessary. This is what happens when you follow the "magic numbers are evil" principle without applying any common sense filter. Next up: creating a constant called PLUS_ONE because incrementing by 1 isn't self-documenting enough! 🤦‍♂️

Abomination Of A Story Management System

Abomination Of A Story Management System
Behold, the pinnacle of game development: storing your entire storyline in a global array and using hardcoded indices to track plot points. Because who needs databases or state machines when you can just check if storyline_array[367] == 1 to determine if you've already done something? The real masterpiece is using instance_destroy() as your universal solution. Lunch with Fern? Destroy the instance. Already completed a task? Destroy the instance. Relationship problems? You guessed it— instance_destroy() . Meanwhile, poor Rhode gets the "Do Nothing" treatment. Clearly the developer's favorite character won the popularity contest. This code is basically the digital equivalent of writing your novel's plot points on sticky notes, scattering them across the floor, and numbering them randomly.

The Magic Number Mastermind

The Magic Number Mastermind
The galaxy brain approach to coding: why bother with a handful of dynamic variables when you can create a magnificent constellation of magic numbers? Nothing says "I trust my future self" quite like hardcoding 50 constants instead of using meaningful variables that might actually explain what your code does. The real 200 IQ move is creating a codebase so rigid that when requirements change (and they always change), you get to play the exciting game of "find and replace across 47 files." Bonus points if you name them all var1 through var50 !

Some Actual Code I Found Inside A Game

Some Actual Code I Found Inside A Game
The code is a perfect example of why game developers shouldn't be allowed near RNGs unsupervised! 😂 What we're looking at is a glorious mess of Python where someone created two nearly identical functions ( count_greater_than_11 and count_greater_than_5 ) that generate random numbers between 1-20 and increment a counter when the number exceeds a threshold. But wait! The function names and comments don't even match - one says "greater than 11" in the comment but checks for > 10 in the code, while the other claims to check for > 5 but actually checks for > 4! And then there's that lonely is_divisible_by_7 function at the bottom, just hanging out with no apparent connection to anything else. It's like someone started implementing their own version of RNG bias with specific magic numbers, got bored halfway through, and shipped it anyway. This is probably why that boss battle feels unfairly difficult every 7th attempt...