Easter Eggs (via @jwz) 1
Yes, there are a bunch of easter eggs in Mozilla; so? By and large they’re pretty small, but that doesn’t really matter, because they serve a very important purpose: first, they’re entertaining to find (I love it when I stumble across them in other programs, and judging by the amount of mail I get about these things, so do a lot of other people.) Programs should be fun to use. But by far their most important reason for existing is that they are fun to write. Hackers get a kick out of puzzles, and you know what? If dropping in an easter egg allows a hacker to blow off some steam and consequently stick around the office for a few hours longer, and put in a 20 hour day instead of merely a 16 hour day, then those are resources well spent. The hacker’s happy at having been creative; somewhere down the road, some users will be amused by it; and the program ships faster, and is a better program because the people who wrote it cared about it. Everybody wins.
Yes, such toys are “unprofessional.” I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that’s not what I do. I’m a hacker, not an engineer.