3 ms·

And at the same time everyone in the JavaScript world is comfortable with using some hungarian-ish notation. $ is for jquery objects, Capitals are for classes,

by Swizec 10y ago

And at the same time everyone in the JavaScript world is comfortable with using some hungarian-ish notation. $ is for jquery objects, Capitals are for classes, lowercase for instances, camelCase for methods and properties, UPPERCASE for constants, underscore_case for API values, snake-case for CSS classes. To name a few common conventions. None of this is enforced at the tools level.

dualogy 10y ago
Hungarian notation IIRC is specifically a 1-char-prefix of an argument names indicating type, ie. `goToWork (bTrth, sTxt, iCnt)` -- ie to reinforce type expectations -- rather than such casing conventions.. http://foldoc.org/hungarian%20notation http://foldoc.org/hungarian%20notation
- Silhouette 10y ago
  Yes, that's more-or-less correct. The prefix wouldn't necessarily be only a single character. For example, using a "p" prefix for pointer values was a common convention in Microsoft ecosystem projects where Hungarian notation was probably most popular. Thus a pointer-to-char (char*) parameter might be prefixed with "pc". But yes, the fundamental idea was to convey information about the type of the variable as part of its name. That convention has mostly died out today, probably due to a combination of IDEs being used routinely in the ecosystem where the notation was most popular, and more recently due to modern languages having better type systems that enforce the rules objectively instead of relying on a convention. Ironically, with the popularity of dynamically typed languages today, we sometimes seem to have regressed to a point where interfaces to functions aren't always clear, and lots of avoidable bugs creep in due to passing incorrect types of data around. The emphasis on rapid evolution and ad-hoc/organic design we see with a lot of "agile" development processes isn't always helpful either. Put those together, and you almost have the complete opposite of the systematic design and robust processes advocated in the slides here.
  - throwawayish 10y ago
    > But yes, the fundamental idea was to convey information about the type of the variable as part of its name. No. There are two types of Hungarian Notation. The original one ("apps hungarian"), which made sense and sometimes still makes sense. Here you would assign a meaning to a prefix. For example, if you're writing MS Word a variable named "sWidth" might be the width of something in pixels on the screen (s), while "pWidth" might be the same width, but in logical units (say pt) on the page. Then you could have a function ptos, and it's easy to see whether variables were used correctly in computations - you can't mix screen-space and page-space coordinates without conversion. This made a lot of sense, because either variable would likely just be an "int". Similarly in a Python Webapp one might write "us_name" where us means UnSanitized. So before passing that anywhere else you know you need to sanitize it. See a "us_" variable somewhere that isn't a call to a sanitizer? Probably a bug! Then there's that other one, "system hungarian", which is the stupid thing everyone knows with stuff like lpcstrWindowName.
    - badsectoracula 10y ago
      Actually it would be something like cxPixels and cxPoints with c meaning "count", x meaning "horizontal" and Pixels/Point being the actual unit. You can see several Windows structs having this naming convention (the simplest one being SIZE which simply contains cx and cy). EDIT: people often see these as prefixes, but they are not really prefixes, the original paper was about the whole name.
    - Silhouette 10y ago
      All of your examples are still type information. They are more specific than the types provided by a basic C-style type system, but that's the point.
      - temac 10y ago
        We can easily distinguish between the two by calling them units.
        10y ago
mnsc 10y ago
I knew that what you referred to as underscore_case was called snake_case so I had to find out what your "snake-case" (with dashes) is called. It's kebab case, or if the words are capitalized, train case. sh-i-sh-k-eb-ab----- I can see it! Choo-Choo-Train I can see it! So, carry on...

by Swizec 10y ago

dualogy 10y ago

Hungarian notation IIRC is specifically a 1-char-prefix of an argument names indicating type, ie. `goToWork (bTrth, sTxt, iCnt)` -- ie to reinforce type expectations -- rather than such casing conventions.. http://foldoc.org/hungarian%20notation http://foldoc.org/hungarian%20notation

Silhouette 10y ago
Yes, that's more-or-less correct. The prefix wouldn't necessarily be only a single character. For example, using a "p" prefix for pointer values was a common convention in Microsoft ecosystem projects where Hungarian notation was probably most popular. Thus a pointer-to-char (char*) parameter might be prefixed with "pc". But yes, the fundamental idea was to convey information about the type of the variable as part of its name. That convention has mostly died out today, probably due to a combination of IDEs being used routinely in the ecosystem where the notation was most popular, and more recently due to modern languages having better type systems that enforce the rules objectively instead of relying on a convention. Ironically, with the popularity of dynamically typed languages today, we sometimes seem to have regressed to a point where interfaces to functions aren't always clear, and lots of avoidable bugs creep in due to passing incorrect types of data around. The emphasis on rapid evolution and ad-hoc/organic design we see with a lot of "agile" development processes isn't always helpful either. Put those together, and you almost have the complete opposite of the systematic design and robust processes advocated in the slides here.
- throwawayish 10y ago
  > But yes, the fundamental idea was to convey information about the type of the variable as part of its name. No. There are two types of Hungarian Notation. The original one ("apps hungarian"), which made sense and sometimes still makes sense. Here you would assign a meaning to a prefix. For example, if you're writing MS Word a variable named "sWidth" might be the width of something in pixels on the screen (s), while "pWidth" might be the same width, but in logical units (say pt) on the page. Then you could have a function ptos, and it's easy to see whether variables were used correctly in computations - you can't mix screen-space and page-space coordinates without conversion. This made a lot of sense, because either variable would likely just be an "int". Similarly in a Python Webapp one might write "us_name" where us means UnSanitized. So before passing that anywhere else you know you need to sanitize it. See a "us_" variable somewhere that isn't a call to a sanitizer? Probably a bug! Then there's that other one, "system hungarian", which is the stupid thing everyone knows with stuff like lpcstrWindowName.
  - badsectoracula 10y ago
    Actually it would be something like cxPixels and cxPoints with c meaning "count", x meaning "horizontal" and Pixels/Point being the actual unit. You can see several Windows structs having this naming convention (the simplest one being SIZE which simply contains cx and cy). EDIT: people often see these as prefixes, but they are not really prefixes, the original paper was about the whole name.
  - Silhouette 10y ago
    All of your examples are still type information. They are more specific than the types provided by a basic C-style type system, but that's the point.
    - temac 10y ago
      We can easily distinguish between the two by calling them units.
      - 10y ago

mnsc 10y ago

I knew that what you referred to as underscore_case was called snake_case so I had to find out what your "snake-case" (with dashes) is called. It's kebab case, or if the words are capitalized, train case. sh-i-sh-k-eb-ab----- I can see it! Choo-Choo-Train I can see it! So, carry on...