The Evolutionary Ladder of Code Commenting
Description
A five-panel meme using the 'Vince McMahon Reaction' or 'Expanding Brain' format. The left column displays different ways to write comments in code, escalating in absurdity, while the right column shows Vince McMahon's increasingly excited reactions. The sequence begins with standard comment syntax: `/* */` (multi-line C-style), then `//` (single-line C-style), `<!-- -->` (HTML), and `#` (scripting languages like Python). McMahon's reactions grow from mild interest to wild enthusiasm. The final panel, the punchline, shows a line of JavaScript code: `var s = "this is a comment";`. This is not a comment but an actual variable assignment. McMahon's reaction is one of ultimate, mind-blown ecstasy. The joke satirizes coding practices, presenting the most absurd and incorrect way to 'comment' code as the most enlightened, a piece of humor that resonates with experienced developers who have seen all manner of questionable code quality and anti-patterns
Comments
7Comment deleted
This is how you write a comment that passes the linter, the compiler, and the code review, but fails the sanity check
When the style guide bans /* */, the linter rejects //, and the security scanner freaks over <!-- -->, you end up declaring const _ = 'comment'; - peak dev steganography
I've seen production code where someone wrote an entire design document in concatenated string literals because "the compiler strips them out anyway" - turns out they'd been shipping 2MB of their architectural decisions to every customer for three years
The real horror isn't the string-as-comment antipattern - it's realizing this was probably someone's 'clever' workaround because their minifier was stripping actual comments, and now it's in production, passing code review, and somehow became the team standard. At least it's better than the legacy codebase where comments are stored in a separate database table with foreign keys to line numbers
Pro tip: if your minifier keeps stripping comments, assign them to a var so they survive to prod, ruin tree‑shaking, and show up in the i18n catalog - nothing says senior engineering like paying to localize your sarcasm
Since the build strips comments, we document hacks as string literals - portable across stacks and guaranteed to reach prod alongside the bug (and a few extra KB)
The enterprise comment: heap-allocated, grep-proof, and primed for that next OOM killer surprise