• @dankm@lemmy.ca
    6•10 months ago

    Naming things is one of the two hardest problems in computer science. The other one is cache coherency and off by one errors.

    • @InputZero@lemmy.ml
      1•10 months ago

      The number of times I have labeled something as fart, poop, fart_poop, temp_fart_poop, etc, and just forgot about it is not okay.

    • @xia@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      I'm glad you provided a link, because I would not have believed you otherwise. Take my upvote.

  • palordrolap
    2•10 months ago

    U nd to rembr tht mny snr devs grw up prgrmng on old hrdwr tht ddn't hv mch mmry & oftn th lang ony allwd shrt var nms anywy. Also thy wr th gen of txtspk fr smlr rsns.

    Yngr snr devs pckd up bd hbts frm tht gen.

    And here's a sentence that's not squashed to cleanse your palettes / give a sigh of relief because I figure if I need a break from typing like that, you need a break from reading it.

    Nmng thngs s hrd.

  • @IphtashuFitz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2•10 months ago

    Many years ago I had to try to debug a memory manager written by a really talented software engineer, with an interesting take on naming things…

    • He referred to blocks of memory as “cookies”.

    • He had a temporary variable named “handy” because it was handy to have around.

    • He had a second temporary variable that referenced the first one that he called “son_of_handy”.

    • If corruption was detected in a block of memory then it would set the flag “shit_cookie_corrupt”.

    • If too many cookies were corrupt then the system would halt by calling the function “oh_shit_oh_shit_oh_shit”.

  • @SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
    1•10 months ago

    Hey, sometimes we put a little effort into our acronyms. I published a component named UTI and it was too late to change it by the time management caught on.

  • PxtlEnglish
    1•10 months ago

    Hah, I (a Sr developer at the time) once built an entire mapping layer in our ETL system to deal with the fact that our product had long and expressive names for every data point but our scientists used statistical tools that had no autocomplete and choked on variable names longer than 32 chars so they named everything in like 8 chars of disemvoweled nonsense.

    • andrewEnglish
      0•10 months ago

      Are you not blind after staring at ABAP?

        • andrewEnglish
          1•10 months ago

          I'm not gonna lie, I haven't seen ABAP in 10 years and was only briefly familiar with it. But I did what one does and asked GPT4 for some tax computation ABAP.

          DATA: lv_income TYPE P DECIMALS 2 VALUE '50000',
      lv_tax_rate TYPE P DECIMALS 2,
      lv_tax_amount TYPE P DECIMALS 2.

* Select the appropriate tax rate from the tax table based on income
SELECT SINGLE TAX_RATE INTO lv_tax_rate 
FROM ZTAX_TABLE 
WHERE INCOME >= lv_income 
ORDER BY INCOME ASCENDING.

IF sy-subrc = 0.
  lv_tax_amount = lv_income * lv_tax_rate / 100.
  WRITE: / 'Income:', lv_income,
         / 'Tax Rate:', lv_tax_rate,
         / 'Tax Amount:', lv_tax_amount.
ELSE.
  WRITE: / 'No tax rate found for income', lv_income.
ENDIF.
          • @WoodenBleachers@lemmy.basedcount.comEnglish
            1•10 months ago

            Oh that looks awful. Maybe it’s just because I don’t know how to read it, but the fact that it is similar to SQL (definitely pronounced sequel at this time) messed with my head

          • @QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
            1•10 months ago

            Oh my, that's an abomination, I'm literally squinting my eyes to read it. That ENDIF tho, that's where I draw the line °~°

          • @Luvon@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1•10 months ago

            This isn’t even like the worst of it. It’s an old enough language they still thought the compiler shouldn’t have to do more work.

            So you have to declare all variables, types, and methods in the top section of the class, and the method implementation in its own section. That means while working on a method, the method signature is a long way away. And because abap developers are allergic to splitting up code into reasonable classes, that can be a couple thousand lines away.

            Oh and all classes are in the global namespace. So all the classes you make must start with the letter z because SAP reserves any and all names that don’t start with z.

            Oh and they didn’t feel like making library code to do a lot of basic stuff, oh no, they thought that 3000+ keywords was a much better system. Especially sense hovering over a keyword gives no documentation and discoverable is therefore pretty terrible.

            Also they wanted everything to be sentenced like so keyword structures are often many special words in specific orders and hopefully you can write enough of it to get a prompt to fill in the rest.

    • @Luvon@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0•10 months ago

      Character limits and a stupid badly used Hungarian notation to waste limited characters to tell use what the ide already knows.

      If you have a table, (that’s an array for sane programmers) name the variable as a plural and we will know it’s a table.

      Don’t name two variables the same stupid abbreviation with different Hungarian notation characters stuck to the front

        • @Luvon@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1•10 months ago

          But that is a typing weakness of that language. I just prefer using languages where the compiler actually does know what the types are at all time and thus can inform me instead of me trying to make sure that types align correctly.

          That is tedious work that has been proven to be a terrible idea to shift onto humans. Strong type systems make much more robust code.

          Abap only has one collection type, and its tables. Contextually it’s not hard to read what a collection of things are and what a single thing is.

          If I am looping through comments and do something with comment, it’s contextually clear what ma going on. The exact type can be easily checked for when it’s actually needed.

          Naming a count of something the plural seems like a much less intuitive thing. Especially sense generally the count is gotten from the collection.

  • PxtlEnglish
    0•10 months ago

    Also, can somebody explain this to sysadmins when it comes to naming computers?

    I mean programmers can have some weird naming conventions, but I've never met an adult professional programmer who named all his variables after planets or Harry Potter characters or just called everything stuff like ADMUTIL6 or PBLAB03T1 or PBPCD1602.

  • @erogenouswarzone@lemmy.mlEnglish
    -1•10 months ago

    Does anyone have any good advice on variable naming? Here's some of my rules I try to live by:

    • camelCase
    • use prefixes
    • prefixes should be one word followed by an underscore.
    • 10 character limit or 3 word limit, not counting the prefix
    • functions should be prefixed with the file in which they're defined, ie utils_FooBar
    • file names should be one word
    • Start Bools with is
    • Don't use not in bool names.
      • This has farther-reaching implications that will keep you from making confusing code most of the time (I'm sure this will be controversial, but it works no matter what they say)
    • start output with _
    • Globals should be g_VARIABLENAME
    • use the least amount of words possible
    • but being too verbose can draw attention - use this to aide in readability
      • calc_ImportantValueThatWillDecideTheUsersView is better than calc_SumYears if the variable is more important than the others.
    • Even the greatest variable names are not replacements for documentation
    • Even the most readable code is not replacement for documentation.
      • Force yourself to love documentation.

    Edit: I realize I was speaking about function-naming with the prefix stuff.

    For variables, I still use prefixes, but for variable type. Even if you define the variables as types, it's still incredibly useful. For instance,

    a string is s_MyName,

    enumerable is e_MyType,

    A number is int or double or whatever i_MyAge or d_MyWeight

    This might be obvious for custom objects, but I'd still do it like this p_Person or per_Person.

    Seriously it does make a huge difference