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Epic Games' woke coding standards

excreationist

excreationist

Married mouth-breather
At Epic Games, we have a few simple coding standards and conventions. This document reflects the state of Epic Games' current coding standards. Following the coding standards is mandatory.
........
Inclusive Word Choice

Word choice applies when you:
  • name classes
  • functions
  • data structures
  • types
  • variables
  • files and folders
  • plugins.

It applies when you write snippets of user-facing text for the UI, error messages, and notifications. It also applies when writing about code, such as in comments and changelist descriptions.

The following sections provide guidance and suggestions....

Racial, ethnic, and religious inclusiveness

Do not use metaphors or similes that reinforce stereotypes. Examples include contrast black and white or blacklist and whitelist.

Do not use words that refer to historical trauma or lived experience of discrimination. Examples include slave, master, and nuke.

Gender inclusiveness

Refer to hypothetical people as they, them, and their, even in the singular.

Refer to anything that is not a person as it and its. For example, a module, plugin, function, client, server, or any other software or hardware component.

Do not assign a gender to anything that doesn't have one.

Do not use collective nouns like guys that assume gender.

Avoid colloquial phrases that contain arbitrary genders, like "a poor man's X".

.....

Overloaded Words

Many terms that we use for their technical meanings also have other meanings outside of technology. Examples include abort, execute, or native. When you use words like these, always be precise and examine the context in which they appear.
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Well I thought that was surprising.
 
Argentbear

Argentbear

Well-Known Member
I have good friends who are Caucasian and they adopted two girls from Africa. They enrolled the girls in the local Catholic elementary school and life was fine until one day when the dioceses bishop payed a visit and gave a talk about ethics. He noted God views white is always good and black is always sinful and bad and did so while looking directly at the girls. Words can hurt and hurt badly even if they weren't used in a way to cause hurt like the Bishop did. Sometimes we need reminders to actually think about what we are saying
 
excreationist

excreationist

Married mouth-breather
Argentbear said:
Its called a thesaurus
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Even if they can come up with alternatives to the banned words the name changes could cause incompatibilities between people with versions of the code before the change and after, etc. BTW there is an Unreal engine plugin called Nuke and it seems like that name would be banned since it is a plugin for Epic's Unreal engine.
 
Alien826

Alien826

No religious beliefs
9-10ths_Penguin said:
It seems like you don't realize that coding standards are a thing.

Any programmer working as part of a team will have to deal with rules about how to name variables/objects/functions/etc.
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I was a programmer for many years before I retired.

The rules I was used to were typically about consistency, for example prefixing field names in a record with a prefix that identified the file. Cuss words were generally discouraged. I don't remember any rules that addressed normal English words, like "black" and "white" that were supposed to have some esoteric hidden meaning. In any case, it was generally understood that code was only seen by other programmers.

I remember someone suggesting that master/slave (which has been used for years to refer to code routines where one controls the other) should be changed. It never got any traction, first because time (which would not make any money for the company) would have to be allocated, and also that any change to code introduces risk, and would have to be rigorously tested. "If it ain't broke don't fix it". In general management were more interested in getting the next project done on time than worrying about this kind of thing.

One guy got into trouble when his test results were shown to a customer and he had entered the name "Ben Dover". That wasn't code though, just test data. It's amazing how little it takes to offend some people these days.

Here's a story that may or may not be true. A software product that kept program code in a library used a 4-letter security code that was associated with the piece of code. It was generally not used, and had the feature switched off, but the product would generate the codes anyway. Guess what, random generation of 4-letter groups will sometimes spell cuss words! This was addressed by having an internal list of "bad" words that would be used to avoid them. There were people that claimed they had access to these (supposedly secret) lists and a lot of hilarity ensued. Then some genius solved the whole thing by removing vowels from the the group of letters that were used.
 
Eddi

Eddi

Christianity, Taoism, and Humanism
Premium Member
Alien826 said:
I remember someone suggesting that master/slave (which has been used for years to refer to code routines where one controls the other) should be changed
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I know someone who works as a programmer and he said that in his place of work they don't call whatever it is a "slave" due to connotations with slavery - which he thinks is ridiculous
 
Heyo

Heyo

Veteran Member
Alien826 said:
One guy got into trouble when his test results were shown to a customer and he had entered the name "Ben Dover". That wasn't code though, just test data. It's amazing how little it takes to offend some people these days.
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Unreachable code isn't.
I had to program a routine, and I asked the project manager what I should do if I encountered invalid input. Her answer was, "that can't happen". Well, she must have had someone else check the data beforehand.
Then I got in trouble when the message popped up, "This can't happen. - <date> <name of manager>" two weeks later at the customer.
 
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