I've watched enough "programmers at play" and read enough code to happily believe that this guy was just letting his sense of humor have its day. I'm not at all convinced that things like this are deliberate obfuscation. Of course, I'm not the one who had to disentangle it all.
We've all read bad code with bad names that nonetheless "works" (except perhaps for the occasional minor glitch). This is perhaps just one that combines poor programming style with a mis-placed sense of humor.
True enough. In the 7th grade, I once divided some number by 100,000 by writing out the long division, and writing 03=0, 7-0=7, 07=0, etc. The teacher came by and was completely baffled where I had gone wrong in my education, but I was just bored :)
My previous employer, you could work out the function of a server and its platform from its name; it was embedded within the name. There were index numbers when we had more than one which wasn't ideal, but....
My current employer, it helps if you know your nature taxonomies in some detail. We may have more to keep track of and so more namespace clashing, but I can't help but feel it's a suboptimal solution.
Naming computers using a linguistic convention unrelated to their function is a good idea, because there's a good chance you switch what your hardware is doing. The worst outcome is when you have computers named things like "webserver1", "webserver2" and then you get some new hardware so webserver1 is no longer your webserver, it's your test server.
We've all read bad code with bad names that nonetheless "works" (except perhaps for the occasional minor glitch). This is perhaps just one that combines poor programming style with a mis-placed sense of humor.