When Copywriters Try To Program
20-Oct-08
Not that I'm against a bit of cross-pollination, and I certainly enjoy the occasional ad that speaks to my inner (and outer) geek, but if you're going to do it, do it right. Case in point, the Axe ad to the left. On first look to most people it probably seems funny, if perhaps a bit cutesy. Upon closer inspection, though, I suspect most people will recognize the code's flaws, but semantic and logical.
For starters, the call to "understand.this" makes no sense. At best, this would likely return a reference to "understand", which makes it redundant. At worst, it's a compiler error. (Both these comments are, of course, somewhat language dependent.) Next, we all know that using the equals operator (==) can be problematic. Further, it seems odd to compare "you" to "understand.this", which are likely different data types and therefore defy comparison. A more logical and semantically valid statement would be:
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if( you.understand( this ) ) {
As well, the call to "get.a.girlfriend" is problematic. For starters, the object/property/call chain makes little sense. While it might be work well as a URL, it is clearly an action and therefore (again) should be a method call, not a property/field call. Notice as well that the call operator (()) is missing, which, while valid in a few languages, is generally not acceptable. Again, the perhaps correct way of writing this would be:
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you.get( girlfriend );
Or, perhaps:
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you.getGirlfriend();
Or we could go all the way, abstract it out a bit more, and go with:
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you.getFriend( Gender.Female, Interest.Romantic );
Rolling that up into a complete block, you wind up with:
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if( you.understand( this ) )
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{
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you.getFriend( Gender.Female, Interest.Romantic );
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}
'Nuff said...
(Thanks to Kelly for the original link to the ad - http://cerium50.niloo.fr/18-10-2008/creatives-ads-volume-3/)
