This is such a stereotype of a kind of over-analytical type that it's hilarious. There are so many poor assumptions and overcaution.
"If we put an easter egg in, it would be impossible to sneak in" - It isn't about being completely undetected for the people looking at source code, it's for the people who want to see a funny print output.
"If we put an easter egg in, more people will want to put more in, or make the original more elaborate" - complete speculation, handled if true by the word "no".
"I bet you all think me writing this means I'm hiding something" - projecting much?
"If we would allow some features to get added like that, where would we draw the line? What other functionality and code do we merge into curl without properly disclosing and documenting it?" - Uh, the line is the definition you put in the top of the article: "An unexpected or undocumented feature in a piece of computer software, included as a joke or a bonus." This excludes malicious or harmful software.
"We frequently ship bugs and features that go wrong." Yeah, it seems you have more important work to do if that statement is accepted as a given. And when the heck does a bug look like an easter egg?
1. Including undocumented code is a breach of trust.
2. Adding a “fun” piece of code that’s not useful (and “secret”!) adds to the burden of maintainership.
3. People will inevitably want to add to the Easter egg code. Maintainers by and large are overworked, especially for software used on the scale of curl. They have better things to do.
If you want curl with Easter eggs, fork it and see if others will use it.
My entire premise is that you are wrong on all counts. Your ideological point is balanced by the fact that no one cares in reality. `apt-get` and other tools are used in critical systems all day long, and Krebs isn't blogging about it. Easter eggs aren't causing outages and data breaches. The fact we're discussing it all is a form of bait; the entire discussion is useless and distracting a-la Twitter culture wars, but we're addicted to the debate of minutiae.
The only point I acknowledge is part two of point #3: They have better things to do, especially if, as the author says, they constantly ship buggy code.
I don't feel strongly about including easter eggs in the codebase. I feel strongly that someone I suppose is very intelligent feels so strongly about it for such foolish reasons. But, it is their code, and curl is a wonderful tool. Their blog about easter eggs is laughable in how seriously it takes itself when it comes off like a joke.
At this point the lack of any Easter Eggs almost IS the hidden feature. I would not have expected this much discussion and controversy, it causes more surprise than an actual egg in the app would!
"If we put an easter egg in, it would be impossible to sneak in" - It isn't about being completely undetected for the people looking at source code, it's for the people who want to see a funny print output.
"If we put an easter egg in, more people will want to put more in, or make the original more elaborate" - complete speculation, handled if true by the word "no".
"I bet you all think me writing this means I'm hiding something" - projecting much?
"If we would allow some features to get added like that, where would we draw the line? What other functionality and code do we merge into curl without properly disclosing and documenting it?" - Uh, the line is the definition you put in the top of the article: "An unexpected or undocumented feature in a piece of computer software, included as a joke or a bonus." This excludes malicious or harmful software.
"We frequently ship bugs and features that go wrong." Yeah, it seems you have more important work to do if that statement is accepted as a given. And when the heck does a bug look like an easter egg?