I worked with a developer who insisted on using the shortest names possible. God I hated debugging his code.
I’m talking variable names like AAxynj. Everything looking like matrix math.
Ah, must’ve been a fortran developer. I swear they have this ability to make the shortest yet the least memorable variable names. E.g. was the variable called APFLWS or APFLWD? Impossible to remember without going back and forth to recheck the definition. Autocomplete won’t help you because both variables exist.
And you can write more than six characters, but only the first six are recognized. So APFLWSAC and APFLWSAF are really the same variable.
And without namespaces, company policy reserves the first two characters for module prefix and Hungarian notation.
He did write some Fortran in his past! What made you think it was Fortran influence?
72 characters per line/card.
Then you realize your code is undebuggable because half the functions and variables have single-letter names or called
foo,bar,baz, etc.Single character variable names are my pet peeve. I even name iterator variables a real word instead of “i” now… (although writing the OG low level for loops is kinda rare for me now)
Naming things “x”… shudder. Well, the entire world is getting to see how that idea transpires hahah
name your function as
malloc()and see to world burn and generate bugs at factorial rate.If you name it malloc it will be easy to notice. On the other hand if you call it free…
Nah, I name all my variables after my homies.
int dave = 0;does dave know he’s a zero?
In zero-based indexing, zero is #1.
mathematician here, where is the joke?
This joke is funny only if placed in Arnold-Atyah manifold if Kolmogorov-Ramachandran-Yu metric is defined
So don’t use it in non-KRY-definite AA situations, or you could get erroneous results. QQX is fine though, as long as you have non-vanishing ABCD. /s
I wonder if Lean proofs become the new peer review like I’ve heard suggested, if mathematics might break from this, and look more compsci-ish in the future. That way non-specialists could get up to speed quickly.
Variable names should be “self defining” meaning you should be able to understand what its doing from the name. The name also shouldn’t be too long. Combining those together makes it difficult to come up with an “elegant” name
I think they got the joke, they were just joking about how this is common in math :P
The most atrocious variable names I ever encountered in code were as a research assistant for a math professor doing game theory simulations. Literally unreadable unless you had a copy of his paper on the subject to refer to
tmp3 = tmp1 + tmp2 ; T.T
in the linux community it’s really common to have applications like MPD, music player daemon, or MPC, music player client, and ncmpc, ncurses music player client, and ncmpcpp the aforementioned one with ++ tacked onto the end.
Cmus, which from what i can recall is literally “c music player”
etc…
Older C compilers would truncate a variable name if it was too long, so
VeryLongGlobalConstantInsideALibraryInSecondsmight accidentally collide withVeryLongGlobalConstantInsideALibraryInMinutes.Legend says that they used to do it after a single letter with Dennis declaring “26 variables ought to be enough for anyone”.
You should really be naming all your variables by generating 64 character (minimum) random strings.
Make it 63 (31?) to align with what C99 can distinguish.
Also: I really like unicode in identifiers. So if at all possible don’t just have a random string of letters and numbers, make sure to include greek letters and all the funny emojis. (I just forgot which languages and compilers etc allow that.)
For extra fun, you can name your variables using solely Unicode invisible characters (e.g. non-breaking space) so they’re impossible to visually distinguish
Who needs private variables when you can generate cryptographically secure variable names? Much better security.
FullSentenceExplainingExactlyWhatItDoes(GiveThisVariable, SoItCanWork)for whatever in stuff:
for myList in myElement:
Was just talking about gaming genre names being kinda lame (roguelike? Souls-like? Where’s the originality?!) and this just furthers my point as programming and video games are intrinsically linked.
floats, doubles, etc are decimallikes. object-oriented programming languages are c++likes. a string that is just the word “false” is a boollike. any language easier to learn than c++ is a pythonlike. any language harder to learn than c++ is a asmlike. don’t like it? then you’re a naglike. you don’t want to be known as a naglike, do you?
Gotten even easier after X became a registered trademark. Now the only choice we have left is i. Or ii if you need more variables
“j” is what you’re supposed to use if you need another index variable after using “i”.
Okay, say you’ve got four inner loops (a crime on its own, I know), do you use i, j, k, l or i, j, k, ii?
lIIl, IIIl, lIlI and IllI
Ok, but what variable is 🐈?
Is the function to con🐈eate and print.
