It's not that exciting!

Chris Maunder

Is it just me or is it time to have an intervention and get everyone to stop placing exclamation marks after every status update. "Error occurred!", "Update complete!", "You pressed a button!!!1!". Enough. Please!

cheers Chris Maunder

jmaida

I always sign birthday cards with "What? again!". "What? Again?" doesn't get it. But as a rule I avoid the emotional "!"

"A little time, a little trouble, your better day" Badfinger

honey the codewitch

In my defense, I rarely use exclamation marks unless I am either joking or having an exceptional moment for some reason. My post here qualified as the latter. As you know, I normally have no trouble finding the gumption to write an article. :laugh: It kind of shocked me that I was having so much trouble.

Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix

PIEBALDconsult

I agree! I think that an exclamation point in a yellow triangle is enough for a warning type of message. There is no reason to also have one in the text. Worse, I recently encountered a website which implored me to "Log in!" Such effusiveness made me much less enthusiastic about doing so. If the user experience is that bad, the code must be horrible.

trønderen

The first version of any text I write is full of noise words, such as 'but', 'however', 'very', and various superfluous punctuation such as dashes, diareses and exclamation marks. I have a list of such elements, and before any sort of 'official' publication of the text, I work through it to remove all that noise, as well as simplifying sentence structure. Sometimes several cleaning rounds are required. For informal forum such as CP I never bother to dig up the complete list, but I always read my message trough from top to bottom before clicking 'Post Message', removing unnecessary words and exclamation marks. When I see 3+ exclamation marks in a single paragraph, or 2+ !? together, my intuitive reaction is: The writer is probably 14 or younger.

Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.

PIEBALDconsult

trønderen wrote:

diareses

Or maybe ellipsises...?

trønderen

Of course ... :-) (it is late at night in Norway right now)

Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.

PIEBALDconsult

Isn't it always night during January in Norway?

pkfox

I always read my message trough Trough !

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP

Sander Rossel

I know a programmer who just loves exclamation marks. He'd used to do things like: MessageBox.Show("An error occurred!!!") Very unprofessional.

Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript

Lost User

Ignore the critics, you still write better (and clearer) English than most native speakers.

OriginalGriff

Terry Pratchett - "Eric":

"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."

"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

den2k88

I used to add exclamation marks in error logs to quickly analyze them with BareTail :D One exclamation mark would trigger the highlighting in yellow, two highlight in red, [OK] in green.

GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next

Jeremy Falcon

Chris Maunder wrote:

You pressed a button!!!1!

Real talk, my mom used to always let go of the shift key when using exclamation marks and did that on accident. So, I spent several years doing that intentionally everywhere, as a joke. :-\

Jeremy Falcon

jeron1

Wasn't there a Seinfeld episode involving exclamation points?

"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment "Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst "I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle

dandy72

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

website which implored me to "Log in!" Such effusiveness made me much less enthusiastic about doing so. If the user experience is that bad, the code must be horrible.

To me the message that gets conveyed is that the developer of said login feature was surprised he got it working at all, and just felt like sharing.

PIEBALDconsult

Or maybe gets paid per login?

dandy72

Jeremy Falcon wrote:

So, I spent several years doing that intentionally everywhere, as a joke. :-\

...and then there's the meme where someone will actually spell out "one" in the middle of one of those, as if it could happen by accident. OMG!!!!1!!one!!

trønderen

As of today, I would call it full daylight from around 08:00 to around 16:00. That is in middle Norway, at 63°N. Norway spans from roughly 58 to 71 degrees, so it varies greatly. We do not have midnight sun in summer where I live! (That is only north of 66°33'N.) One significant difference from places further south: We have extremely long dawn and evening hours (the plural 's' in 'hours' is significant!). So you can never really tell the exact start and end of the day. You can of course go by sunrise/sunset, but it is light long before and long after, enough to read the newspaper without using artificial light. (News_paper_, that is! News webpages are readable even in pitch darkness :-).)

Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.

trønderen

:-) I wrote that message at 02:00 at night; I wasn't completely awake.

Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.