Joe Armstrong, in a favourite talk referred to Robert Virding’s Legendary Comment (singular) in OTP sources. Because it’s friday I tried to track this down and failed. I went back to R13B03 and found this:
lib/compiler/src/v3_life.erl
188: %% This is the tricky bit.
But I’m pretty sure this isn’t that tricky bit. I went back to https://erlang.org/download/otp_src_R6B-0.tar.gz (well before my time), and can’t find that phrase at all. Does anybody else know the timing / origin of this phrase?
I was sure I’ve heard it mentioned on EF, but did a search for Robert and Joe’s posts with the word tricky in them but couldn’t spot it. Here’s a link to them in case it’s of interest:
So way back when Joe and Mike and I were working for the Ericsson Computer Science lab. The lab had a Dec VAX running Berkeley unix. It was actually the first VAX and first unix that Ericsson had. Anyway I was browsing through the bsd unix code and, while most was written in C, there was one long section written in VAX assembler which iirc had to do with process management and context switching. It was basically just page after page of assembler totally without comments. EXCEPT for somewhere in the middle their was ONE comment “And now for the tricky bit”.
I thought this was funny and use it myself sometimes in my code, though I do actually comment my code.
