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Admin
Is that a "2001: A Space Odyssey" reference rather than a bit of sarcasm?
Also, frits.
Admin
Calling the function probably makes a small donation on the creator's bankaccount (where the money comes from, depends on the application).
Admin
This is literally how it's done at Initech
Admin
Ah, yes. Office Space, still a great movie. Moral of the movie: Don't take away someone's stapler.
Admin
"Office Space, still a great movie. " If you could call this function, that would be gr-e-e-e-e-e-at.
Admin
2010, actually. But yeah, I had the same thought.
Admin
* mumble * I could set the building on fire...Admin
The words "Something Wonderful" trigger me. Back in the '90s, a series of three books were released as "Central Casting" (fantasy-contemporary-SF/Future) to help generate a background for your RPG characters. One of the tables in the book was "Something Wonderful", and it is the table you least want to be directed to. Yes, there is some great boon awaiting you, but at what cost? You are sponsored by a wealthy patron! (After the meteorite destroys your home town, leaving you an orphan.) You find a rare and powerful artifact! (And now everyone wants to kill you and take it...) The "Ah, Love!" table is a happier time, even when your beloved turns out to die/be exiled/be an inanimate object....
Admin
If you still have these books, they look like they are worth some serious money now.
Admin
The Comment That Started It All
It began innocently enough. Mark W., a mid-level developer with a reputation for writing clean, if occasionally enigmatic, code, submitted a pull request for a routine feature tweak. The diff was small, the tests passed, and the CI pipeline glowed green like a beacon of approval. But then someone—no one remembers who, though rumors point to a junior dev with a penchant for dramatic Slack emojis—left a comment on the function’s summary: “Does something wonderful?”
At first, it was treated as a joke. A lighthearted nod to the vagaries of documentation. But then the whispers started. In the break room, over lukewarm coffee and stale pastries, developers began to speculate. Was Mark being sincere? Was this a subtle dig at the legacy code he’d been assigned to maintain? Or was it something darker—a coded message, a signal to someone else in the organization that only a select few were meant to understand?
One senior engineer, let’s call her Sarah, was overheard muttering, “If it’s so wonderful, why doesn’t it say what it does?” She later denied making the comment, but not before three different people had already screenshot her Slack status and forwarded it to their respective team leads.
Management Gets Involved
As the days passed, the comment began to attract attention from higher up. The engineering manager, a man named Greg who once described himself as “a servant leader with a bias for action,” called an impromptu meeting to “align on documentation standards.” No agenda was sent. No calendar invite was issued. Just a terse message in the team channel: “Conference Room B. Now.”
When the team arrived, Greg stood at the head of the table, arms crossed, staring at a whiteboard that had been hastily scrawled with the words “What does ‘wonderful’ mean?” in red marker. He didn’t speak for a full minute. Then, in a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “We need to talk about tone.”
Someone in the back coughed. To be continued...
Admin
Another developer shifted uncomfortably in their chair. The silence stretched on, thick and suffocating, until finally, Greg turned to Mark and asked, “Did you mean it literally? Or was this… ironic?”
Mark, caught off guard, stammered something about “contextual clarity” and “developer experience,” but the damage was done. From that moment on, every comment Mark wrote was scrutinized. Every commit message was dissected. Even his Git username—“mwonderful”—was suddenly viewed with suspicion.
The Mysterious Encounters Begin
Then came the encounters.
Late one evening, as Mark was packing up to leave, he noticed a figure standing at the end of the hallway. It was too dark to make out their face, but they were holding a printed copy of the offending function summary, the words “Does something wonderful” highlighted in neon yellow. Before Mark could approach, the figure turned and vanished into the stairwell.
Another time, during a routine stand-up, a senior architect—someone who hadn’t spoken in a meeting in months—suddenly leaned forward and said, “Wonderfulness is subjective. But clarity is not.” Then they stared directly at Mark for an uncomfortable amount of time before logging off without another word.
Rumors began to circulate that the comment was part of a larger power play. Some said Mark was trying to signal allegiance to a faction within the company that favored “narrative-driven development.” Others claimed it was a test—a loyalty oath disguised as documentation. A few even whispered that the comment had been planted by an external consultant, someone brought in to “shake things up” and who now had their sights set on Mark’s role.
The Codebase Speaks
Mark writes: “This comment is not really a ‘representative’ line; it exists in an otherwise very well written 100k+ line codebase.” Maybe it’s not representative of the codebase as a whole, but it clearly represents this section of the codebase wonderfully—or at least, that’s what Mark insists.
To be continued...
Admin
Yet in the eyes of the office, that section has become ground zero for a cultural schism. The code around it, once mundane, now feels charged with hidden meaning. Functions that call it are referred to in hushed tones. Pull requests that touch it are flagged for “additional review.”
One developer, who asked to remain anonymous, claimed they found a comment in a related module that read: “If you’re reading this, you know what happened.” When confronted, they denied ever seeing it. But the comment was still there, lurking in the diff history, a digital ghost that refused to be exorcised.
The Fallout
The drama reached its peak when HR got involved. Not because of any formal complaint, but because someone—again, no one knows who—forwarded the entire thread to the “People Operations” team with the subject line: “Potential Hostile Work Environment?”
An investigation was launched. Interviews were conducted. Developers were asked to recount their interactions with Mark, to describe the tone of his voice during code reviews, to speculate on the intent behind his emoji usage in Slack.
In the end, no formal action was taken. But the atmosphere had changed. Trust was eroded. Alliances were fractured. And Mark? He still writes code. Still submits pull requests. But now, every comment he writes is followed by a parenthetical clarification: “(Note: This is literal. Not sarcastic. Not ironic. Just… factual.)”
And yet, in the quiet moments, when the office is empty and the hum of the servers is the only sound, some say you can still hear it—the echo of those five words, drifting through the corridors like a ghostly refrain:
“Does something wonderful.”
No one knows what it means. But everyone knows it means something.
Admin
Waiting with ba(i)ted breath for the two follow-ups to be released from the mod-hold! Mods, get to it already, for cryin' in the beer...
Admin
That Hmmm story feels like it could have been generated straight by Gemini. By that, I mean it's a very cliché narrative, with all the tropes, fancily polished, lots of fluff, yet entirely empty of content and meaning. It's soulless.
Admin
"Something wonderful" is how David Bowman described turning Jupiter into a star in 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Admin
Yes indeed, and to your point the emdashes were a dead giveaway; I've not seen actual humans use them. My OCD still wanted to know how it all comes out, though, just like Ellis's current ongoing saga.
Admin
My all-time favorite comments are still in this function: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/net/ethernet/sun/sunhme.c?h=v7.2-rc5#n423 HME, or Happy Meal Ethernet, was a 100Mbit/s NIC from Sun. The little sibling of the 1Gbit/s Big Mac NIC.
Admin
you kids-it is a reference to the King and I. the code is good enough.
Admin
Wait, Ummmmm - you were there? -Mark W
Admin
lol
Admin
Yeah but aren't all the stories on this site like that?
Admin
I worked for a client once that had a policy for mandatory XML comments on public members. Obviously there were tons of comments like that or basically just the method name because spoiler, 99% of well written code is self-explanatory. IMO those documention comments only make sense as contract documention of shared components but rarely for internal members which is often the majority of the code of an application. If you have a method GetValue and all the comment says is "gets the value" or worse a long winded story about how what and why you get the value with a personal touch added about the last coffee machine issue, well then you know why policies are often counter productive.
Admin
The em-dashes were a giveaway? How about the fact that it referred to “Does something wonderful" as "those five words". That's either LLM-generated or a clever Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference.
Admin
I use em dashes on occasion. Apparently, the LLMs were all trained on my writing.
Admin
I hear a 'whoosh'. It's intentionally obvious LLM usage that parodies the Ellis story. Or am I doing the 'whoosh' and your comment was also part of the joke?