this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 122 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 5 months ago (3 children)

He did write some Fortran in his past! What made you think it was Fortran influence?

[–] [email protected] 69 points 5 months ago

72 characters per line/card.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I vomit whenever I have to read one letter alias SQL. And then.... I dealias it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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”.

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Nah, I name all my variables after my homies.

int dave = 0;

[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago (2 children)

does dave know he's a zero?

[–] [email protected] 52 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In zero-based indexing, zero is #1.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

His best friends index starts at 0

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 5 months ago (1 children)

installing operating system: 15 minutes, give or take.

give a name to the computer: 45 minutes

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 5 months ago (2 children)

You should really be naming all your variables by generating 64 character (minimum) random strings.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago

Who needs private variables when you can generate cryptographically secure variable names? Much better security.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

FullSentenceExplainingExactlyWhatItDoes(GiveThisVariable, SoItCanWork)

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (5 children)

"j" is what you're supposed to use if you need another index variable after using "i".

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Then you realize your code is undebuggable because half the functions and variables have single-letter names or called foo, bar, baz, etc.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Yeah, there are 2 hard things.

0: off by one errors 1: cache invalidation 2: naming things

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

name your function as malloc() and see to world burn and generate bugs at factorial rate.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

How to write spaghetti code:

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (6 children)

mathematician here, where is the joke?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think they got the joke, they were just joking about how this is common in math :P

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just be careful naming your function "stdout()" or things could get weird...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

Or Fortran variables that collide with Fortran built-in functions.

Keep in mind that array subscript and function call are both () in Fortran.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

No, that's math.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Now I want to become a programmer so I can give variables people names.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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