4 ms·

I think a lot of this can be generalized as: - Don't force people to guess. Guessing takes time, and is an opportunity for a mistake. - Explicit information i

I think a lot of this can be generalized as: - Don't force people to guess. Guessing takes time, and is an opportunity for a mistake. - Explicit information is better than implicit information. Abbreviations, incomplete identifiers are a form of implicit information. - Lying exists in programming. Identifiers that do not match their purpose can mislead programmers and introduce bugs. e.g: Including side-effects in a function is called "get", "read" or "retrieve". - Coupling brings more information into a scope, making it more complex and decreasing readability.

slau 10y ago
This may not be a popular opinion, but for me read and retrieve are indicative of a side-effect. I consistently use retrieve to indicate fetching things from database, or remote locations (REST, RPC, whatever). Similarly, read, in the case of a parser or whatnot, indicates that the buffer will be advanced. Maybe I'm just too biased because I try to have const-correct/mutable-correct code?
- grzm 10y ago
  Sounds like you're building up a set of conventions which can be very useful when you're consistent with them and communicate them to others reading your code.
- clusmore 10y ago
  Agreed, these words have similar connotations for me as well. I have also seen deliberate usage of set vs update to indicate changes to objects in memory only vs persistence to databases, etc.
  - dllthomas 10y ago
    And of course, with sufficiently aggressive optimization, there may not actually even be a change to an object in memory (or the object in memory to change) in some cases. Not so with the database.
- partycoder 10y ago
  If it's a partial read that requires to track state, then yes. If it's a somehow self-contained read operation that returns a result, while it has side effects (I/O), it may not necessarily have to mutate variables in your program (e.g: load a small file into string variable, make a HTTP response and return the body, etc).

slau 10y ago

This may not be a popular opinion, but for me read and retrieve are indicative of a side-effect. I consistently use retrieve to indicate fetching things from database, or remote locations (REST, RPC, whatever). Similarly, read, in the case of a parser or whatnot, indicates that the buffer will be advanced. Maybe I'm just too biased because I try to have const-correct/mutable-correct code?

grzm 10y ago
Sounds like you're building up a set of conventions which can be very useful when you're consistent with them and communicate them to others reading your code.
clusmore 10y ago
Agreed, these words have similar connotations for me as well. I have also seen deliberate usage of set vs update to indicate changes to objects in memory only vs persistence to databases, etc.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  And of course, with sufficiently aggressive optimization, there may not actually even be a change to an object in memory (or the object in memory to change) in some cases. Not so with the database.
partycoder 10y ago
If it's a partial read that requires to track state, then yes. If it's a somehow self-contained read operation that returns a result, while it has side effects (I/O), it may not necessarily have to mutate variables in your program (e.g: load a small file into string variable, make a HTTP response and return the body, etc).