Remy Porter presents a confession from David C. The submitter writes C++ in a scripting style to create programmatic animations for videos. These programs are built to run once and then disappear from attention. One call made him reconsider that approach.

animation.cpp
fade_out(scene, length4->range(0, 3), length4_3_3, length4[4], length4[5]->range(0, 3));

The call reflects a style that passes parameters through arrays, packing values into positions without meaningful field names. Its third argument, `length4_3_3`, appears to encode a range expression with a size of one. Porter gives `length4->range(3,1)` as one reading and `length4[3]` as the more plausible form. The name records how to retrieve the value, so it says nothing about what the value means. That is the joke behind the reference to John Cage’s composition “4:33”, which questions what qualifies as music.

Porter treats the naming as mild by CodeSOD standards, but points to the practical cost of disposable code. A later project may reuse a supposedly temporary fragment. He closes with a reference to chapter three of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and a mock absolution for the programmer.