4 ms·

Mostly agree, but I still think we should be using shorter variable names and put all that information and context elsewhere. Opinion: It's (nigh) 2020. If you

by kortex 7y ago

Mostly agree, but I still think we should be using shorter variable names and put all that information and context elsewhere. Opinion: It's (nigh) 2020. If you aren't using an editor which supports inspection and jump-to-declaration, you are doing it wrong. Similarly, if you are using a dynamic language and not leveraging type hinting or similar, you are doing it wrong. Where "doing it wrong" == doing a disservice to yourself, your coworkers, and future you. We have so much powerful metadata available right now. So with the examples above, you should be able to focus on `employeeRoles`, hit `hotkey`, and see a gist of the types, key format, what to do with that thing, and why it's there. Names should be unique and memorable enough that once you form that mental schema, you can quickly scan through code and understand its role in the greater machinations, without too much mental re-parsing.

zck 7y ago
The benefit of naming things to explain them is to obviate the need for jump-to-declaration. Yes, any time I need to know what 5*6 is, I can walk into the other room and get my calculator -- but if I have that knowledge in my head, I don't need to go look it up. I think it's relatively agreed-upon that single-character variable names are bad, because they don't tell us enough about what the variable holds. So, too, do I feel about the type, when it's not obvious from context. So `age` would be clear enough that it's numeric^1. But what about the other example of `employees`? I would not know what I can do with that without having to jump back to the definition! Naming it `employeesById` tells you what you can do with it. And that seems like a win to me. [1] It might not differentiate between integers and floats, but that feels too nitpicky to me to put in the name.
leetcrew 7y ago
as someone who works on a large c++ project, I disagree, mainly just because it can take a long time for intellisense to actually jump me to the definition. there are also many ways intellisense can get confused and present me with a page of 100 similar function definitions that I need to scroll through. few things break my concentration like waiting 10+ seconds for intellisense to decide whether it's actually going to be able to jump me to the definition. imo, functions and variables should be named in such a way that the reader can get a pretty good idea of what's going on without jumping into a bunch of other scopes. try not to make them too long, but err on the side of too long rather than too short.

by kortex 7y ago

zck 7y ago

The benefit of naming things to explain them is to obviate the need for jump-to-declaration. Yes, any time I need to know what 5*6 is, I can walk into the other room and get my calculator -- but if I have that knowledge in my head, I don't need to go look it up. I think it's relatively agreed-upon that single-character variable names are bad, because they don't tell us enough about what the variable holds. So, too, do I feel about the type, when it's not obvious from context. So `age` would be clear enough that it's numeric^1. But what about the other example of `employees`? I would not know what I can do with that without having to jump back to the definition! Naming it `employeesById` tells you what you can do with it. And that seems like a win to me. [1] It might not differentiate between integers and floats, but that feels too nitpicky to me to put in the name.

leetcrew 7y ago

as someone who works on a large c++ project, I disagree, mainly just because it can take a long time for intellisense to actually jump me to the definition. there are also many ways intellisense can get confused and present me with a page of 100 similar function definitions that I need to scroll through. few things break my concentration like waiting 10+ seconds for intellisense to decide whether it's actually going to be able to jump me to the definition. imo, functions and variables should be named in such a way that the reader can get a pretty good idea of what's going on without jumping into a bunch of other scopes. try not to make them too long, but err on the side of too long rather than too short.