472
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
472 points (99.8% liked)
Programmer Humor
29813 readers
1067 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
One way in which this could have come about is that
Math.randomwasn’t supported in all relevant browsers when the library author wrote the library. So they had to roll their own randomness with blackjack and hookers. Later the web standards evolved and the author was able to remove the custom code, but now had people relying on his library’s exposing agetRandomfunction.You see this kind of stuff in C all the time when a code base supports multiple OSs by using macros.
Yes, though at least with C you have the compiler to optimize the cruft out of your binary and end up with a nice, clean program.
With JavaScript this is going to incur some runtime cost everywhere this library is used, even if it only happens once when getting optimized out by the JIT compiler.
Pretty sure that math.random is decades old.
Pretty sure OP’s image is hyperbole.
Right. I'd agree this is a thing that happens, I just thought you were addressing this one in particular
Pretty sure many codebases running today (even JS ones) are older
Math.random() was always in the spec: https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-262_1st_edition_june_1997.pdf
Remember IE? Yeah. Probably responsible for a lot of now-superfluous things like this theory suggests.
Gotta admit, didn't think it was that old
How many JS codebases are over 30 years old? Can you name even one?
And? I don't know how to check but I'd guess math.random was included from the beginning.