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Admin
This reminded me of Rowan Atkinson saying "Bob" in an extremely funny manner.
Admin
Oracle Forms giggle
Admin
Don't see a wtf here. Obviously, as the post explains, it's a debugging function. It has a convenient short but otherwise unused name, so that Bob could easily grep for it and see where he placed it. And of course nothing invokes it, nothing should. Otherwise it wouldn't be unused and Bob couldn't find where he placed it by simple grepping.
Admin
I can imagine Bob put it into a procedure so that he could simply comment one line out and all debug messages went off.
Admin
You don't know that nothing invokes it.
If it is called from a string invoked with 'execute immediate', or if it is in a script on a client machine, it won't appear in the dependency view.
Admin
Yeah, because that's so much better than being able to activate and deactivate them at runtime using a config parameter.
But regardless, the name is horrible.
Admin
Re: things older than your source control history...
Yeah, we have that, too, here where I work. Version history existed before 2006, when the current state of the world was imported from CVS to Subversion, but note that I said "current state of the world". Version history was not considered part of the "current state of the world", so anything in our repository that existed before that date will, nevertheless, begin with that initial SVN commit, and not with the original original date of the item's "real" first commit.
But one part of the ensemble was not imported at that point, and finally made it into the main repo in early 2009, again without the history, so that part of our software has no history before that point.
Fortunately the git-svn tools are much better at preserving history, so in 2017, when we finally(1)(2) migrated from Subversion to git, we did manage to preserve all the old history. Well, all the surviving old history, anyway.
(1) I wasn't involved in any of these decisions, outside of being one of many who was gifted with the fallout in their aftermath.
(2) Speaking of which, I still have an open plan to migrate my personal stuff at home from Perforce ("Helix Core") to git. For those wondering why I didn't start in git, well, it's because when I created the depot, it was the early part of 2001, and git wouldn't exist as a public release for another four years.
Admin
I may have an explanation for Bob. On my team if you need a quick variable name for something when you want to put pen to paper, bob is a go to name. I first ran into using bob in college but when I started working at my current company, I found out other people had already been doing the same thing. We like to use something like this so that during PRs if you see bob, you know it was likely an accident that you checked it in.
If I need more than one variable name my go to is flintstones names.
Admin
When I need a temp string, for some reason, my go-to is "moo". Normally I use it when I make a new path in a web app and just need something to display to show the path is working, but I haven't gotten around to actually coding anything yet (maybe I haven't made the template to display)
Admin
But what about Bob??
Admin
Brillant!
Admin
That's the first thing I thought of, too. Of course that means you can find Bob with Lord Flashheart.
Admin
Bob? Tsk, tsk, tsk. Everyone knows it should be Fred, Jim or Sheila.
Admin
You're using that the dev had access to such things back then.
Edit Admin
It's probably done so one could see it as debugging code - it's not just a random output statement which might be used for something, it's a debugging statement. So you could remove them without affecting the normal output.
Admin
Also cf: _A Deepness in the Sky ( Vernor Vinge, Tor Books, 1999 ). One of the job titles in that book is "Software Archaeologist".
Edit Admin
I knew a guy who specialized in database work in the early 2000s who used Bob when he needed a name for something where the name wasn't important. I think it was his homage to Titan A.E.
Edit Admin
Es tu, Microsoft Bob?
Admin
"Same procedure as last year?" "Same procedure as every year"
Admin
Having a wife who tutors in Archaeology. Digital Archaeology is becoming a thing. And yes it has to do with getting data from tapes but also in how to store data for the future, let us say 10k years.
If you are interested in the latter part look into the long now society https://longnow.org/
Admin
You are either German or Dutch. This is such a classic and part of our New years culture as is Santa for the USA Christmas.
Edit Admin
Looks as though this even predates the whole "Bob" craze that went on about a decade ago. Avon, CO, just a couple hours down I-70 from me, even has a bridge officially named Bob. Not "The Bob Bridge," just ... Bob.
Edit Admin
And since the subject of source control conversion has come up: Around, oh, maybe 2012, it fell to me to move the tens of thousands of scripts in our SQL repository from SurceSfe to SVN. (Yep, right on the cutting edge. That was us.) Apparently there was no easy way to access the history of anything that hadn't been updated since some date of a few years before, so I was told not to worry about those and just bring them straight over. We ended up with thousands of database objects, many if not most of which were still in use, with no history and with me as the original submitter. Yeah, that worked out well. Even though I documented all this in the commits, I got a lot of questions along the lines of "So, about this proc you wrote...?"