How to become a Senior Detective, according to Murderville

Raymond Chen

March 29th, 20223 0

One of my colleagues pointed out a screen shot from the Netflix documentary series¹ Murderville as the Senior Detective introduces himself:

m_vecSockets.clear();
 
m_ButtonStartServer.SetCheck(BST_UNCHECKED);
m_ButtonStartClient.SetCheck(BST_UNCHECKED);
 
EnabledControl();
 
m_wndCountPeople.SetWindowText("0 peop.");
SetWindowText("Error");
}
 
void CChatCppDlg::OnBnClickedButtonSend()
{
CString strChat;
m_wndSend.GetWindowTxt(strChat);
SendChat(strChat);
 
}
 
void CChatCppDl

It looks to me like the Senior Detective is busy typing out the next method of CChatCppDlg at the bottom of the screen.

It also appears that Senior Detectives believe indentation is superfluous, use MFC, and are very conscientious about wasting space, preferring to abbreviate “people” to just “peop.” to save one character. (But why not “ppl.”?)

Another colleague was able to find out that this Senior Detective plagiarized his code from a Russian Web site, which in turn appears to have been derived from an MFC sample program.

So that’s how you become a Senior Detective: Find a Russian Web site, copy its code, including the odd indentation, but strip the comments, and translate the strings back to English. Instant promotion!

¹ No, Murderville is not actually a documentary. It’s a comedy. The running joke in all of these “How to… according to” posts is that I’m naïve and think that all of television is real.

Raymond Chen

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3 comments

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  • Mystery Man 0

    Another colleague was able to find out that this Senior Detective plagiarized his code from a Russian Web site, which in turn appears to have been derived from an MFC sample program. So that’s how you become a Senior Detective: Find a Russian Web site, copy its code, including the odd indentation, but strip the comments, and translate the strings back to English.

    Plagiarism is a strong word for this case. I don’t the Senior Detective would even need to resort to fair use defense. It’s more like de minimis.

  • IS4 0

    In Star Trek: Discovery, the extremely advanced code to operate the ship’s drive is… WinApi headers.

  • Telmo Silva 0

    Nothing to do with this post, although an amusing and informative one (as I have never seen Murderville), but I don’t have hours to waste searching for emails and ways of contacting you. Did you by any chance go to high school in Mississauga, PCSS?

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