“Every now and then some Unicode hyphen character makes its way into comments.”

Julian Fong, a software engineer at Pixar, wrote a short thread on Mastodon with an interesting take I haven’t seen before: I still don’t use any AI code in my work, but I have to review more and more of it these days. One of the things bothering me about that these days is just how lacking in personality that code is. RenderMan is a code base which is now over forty years old. It is a collection of idiosyncratic styles written by equally idiosyncratic people. I’ve been in this code base for 26+ years and I can recognize the author of many chunks simply by looking at indentation, comments, or coding style. And I can often map style to personality quirks of the author. Dan McCoy’s code for converting general polyhedra from 1990 still survives today. Probably one of the few pieces of code left that actually has a for ( ; l; l = l->next) loop for linked lists. Dan is also the only person I’ve ever seen use the abbreviation R.N.G in comments. Tom Duff is the inventor of the Duff Device,…