8mo ago

The easiest problem

https://mastodon.social/@lovegame/112402050452885908

103 comments

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.
  
  He did write some Fortran in his past! What made you think it was Fortran influence?
  
  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.
  
  And the rest of you are COBOL programmers.
- I vomit whenever I have to read one letter alias SQL. And then.... I dealias it.
  
  I don’t understand why people think that it’s acceptable.
  As developers, we’ve had it drummed into us from day one that variable names are important and shouldn’t be one or two letters.
  Yet developers deliberately alias an easy to read table name such as “customer” into “c” because that’s the first letter of the table. I’m sure that it’s more work to do that with auto completion meaning that you don’t even need to type out “customer”.
- At a previous job I had to work with an old database where all the tables and columns had 6-character names
  
  Same. Old DB2 base from the 80's that was migrated to Oracle in the 90's then to Postgres in the 2010's.
  And the people there know all the column names by heart 😅
- shortest names possible
  This film from 1975 is still relevant today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hdJQkn8rtA

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.
  
  His best friends index starts at 0
- Ah, the XCOM approach. Now you look after those variables and get sad when you have to delete them.

installing operating system: 15 minutes, give or take.
give a name to the computer: 45 minutes
- I've got that shit on lockdown man.
  I name all my devices "Fuck0ff" followed by a 3 letter descriptor of what it is. E.g. - my windows install is Fuck0ffDTW for Desktop Windows, my Garuda install is Fuck0ffDTG for Desktop Garuda(it's a flavour of Arch, btw)
  
  What if you would have 2 devices of same type with same OS or just with OS that starts with same letter? Will you use numbers, if yes, how much leading zeroes if any you will use? If you don't use numbers, will you add a room name? But what if there are 2 devices with same OS in the same room?

You should really be naming all your variables by generating 64 character (minimum) random strings.
- Who needs private variables when you can generate cryptographically secure variable names? Much better security.
- 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
  
  Wingdings as well

FullSentenceExplainingExactlyWhatItDoes(GiveThisVariable, SoItCanWork)

Older C compilers would truncate a variable name if it was too long, so VeryLongGlobalConstantInsideALibraryInSeconds might accidentally collide with VeryLongGlobalConstantInsideALibraryInMinutes.
Legend says that they used to do it after a single letter with Dennis declaring "26 variables ought to be enough for anyone".
- I had this problem in my job as a drafter. I was wondering why the hell Tekla would complain about the same object name already being in use despite everything having its own name. took me way too long to realize there wad some stupidly max name length and the program did nothing to alarm the user about trying to put too long name. it just cut the overflow away.

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?

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
- I hate short variable names in general too, but am okay with them for iterators where i and j represent only indices, and when x/y/z represent coordinates (like a for loop going over x coordinates). In most cases I actually prefer this since it keeps me from having to think about whether I'm looking at an integer iterator or object/dictionary iterator loop, as long as the loop remains short. When it gets to be ridiculous in size, even i and j are annoying. Any other short names are a no go for me though. And my god, the abbreviations... Those are the worst.
  
  That’s very reasonable, I can get behind that. (my stance is a partly irrational overreaction and I’m totally aware of it lol)
  Abbreviations are definitely annoying. My least favourite thing to do with them is “Hungarian notation”. It’s like.. in a statically typed context it’s useless, and in a dynamically typed context it’s like.. kind of a sign you need to refactor
- X, y, and z should only be used when working with things with dimensions larger than 1. Indexing into a 2D array, x and y are great uses. I'm also totally fine with i and j for indexer/iterator when appropriate, but I hate when people try to make short variable names for no good reason. We have auto-complete just about everywhere now. Make the names descriptive. There's literally no reason not to.
- Same, except for list comprehension in python, I prefer sinlge character var names there.

Then you realize your code is undebuggable because half the functions and variables have single-letter names or called foo, bar, baz, etc.
- I have a somewhat related real world story. I had a client that was convinced that tons of people were going to decompile their application and sell their own version of the program, so they insisted that they needed their code obfuscated to protect company secrets and make it harder to reverse engineer. I tried explaining to them that obfuscation wasn't that big of a deterrent to someone attempting to steal code through reverse engineering and that it would likely cause some issues with debugging, but they were certain they needed it. Sure enough, they then had a real user run into an issue and were surprised to find that their custom logging system was close to useless because the application was outputting random obfuscated letters instead of function and variable names. We did have mapping files, but it took a lot of time to map each log message to make it readable enough to try to understand the user's issue.
  
  This is why you obfuscate after you code. Just obfuscate the release build. And logging may at that point be thrown out of the window anyway
- I was learning python as a wee scientist in training, and my variables were beyond dreadful. I tried naming a list "list" and the interpreter told me I couldn't, so I opted for "listy". When I needed to name a new list but listy was taken, I'd often resort to "listyy".
  Scientists who work with computers without having much (if any) targeted training on how to code can write the most horrendous programs.

An important professor constantly and frustratingly said
we can call this variable whatever we want, so we’ll call it Fred
Made me panic and irate and focus on the wrong part of the problem. Every. Single. Time.

There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.
- And off by one errors
  
  Yeah, there are 2 hard things.
  0: off by one errors 1: cache invalidation 2: naming things
  
  And DNS issues

Why is no one giving credit to my friend n?!

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....

for whatever in stuff:
- for myList in myElement:
  
  You need to use trigger warnings for this kind of shit.

Since a lot of the english words i know i learned from minecraft, in a farming simulator i named tilled soil"hoed"
I had multiple variables like int isHoed
- There's some hoed in this house If you see 'em, point 'em out

How to write spaghetti code:

mathematician here, where is the joke?
- 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
  
  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....
  
  fia? fir? fib (part of fia)?
- 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.

Now I want to become a programmer so I can give variables people names.
- Ha
  You should hear of the method of pretending you're at breakfast or some other anthropomorphized situation, where you name things as butter and cheese, knife and bread, tea and teapot
  Then there's Hungarian notation which is actually used seriously. But I can't give an entertaining example only s boring and probably inaccurate one.

Just be careful naming your function "stdout()" or things could get weird...
- Or Fortran variables that collide with Fortran built-in functions.
  Keep in mind that array subscript and function call are both () in Fortran.

No, that's math.

Am I being gaslit?
- Gasboss gatelit girlkeep

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?
  
  Javascript is all about them boollikes (or as we sometimes call them, booleish).
  
  Haskell, my favorite pythonlike!

I present to you quality variable names. (and a Mount Rustmore)

rs

    
(Reconfigure(f), 'c') => {
    let mut p: Vec<&str> = vec![];
    loop {
        match args.next() {
            Some(k) => {
                if k == "=" {
                    match args.next() {
                        None => q("need value for Rc"),
                        Some(v) => u(
                            f,
                            |f| Box::new(
                                |c| {
                                    f(c);
                                    c.set(p.iter().copied(), v);
                                    for e in p {
                                        unsafe {
                                            Box::<str>::from_raw(
                                                std::mem::transmute(e)
                                            );
                                        }
                                    }
                                }
                            )
                        )
                    };
                    break
                } else {
                    p.push(Box::leak(k.into()));
                }
            }
            None => error("need path element or = for Rc"),
        }
    }
},