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At Goldman, the internal language Slang has spaces in variable names. It's insane at first glance and I got into an argument with my manager about why in the wo
by necrotic_comp 6y ago
At Goldman, the internal language Slang has spaces in variable names. It's insane at first glance and I got into an argument with my manager about why in the world this was acceptable, and he could give me no other answer than "this is the way it is".
But when you realize that space isn't a valid separator between token, seeing things like "Class to Pull Info From Database::Extractor Tool" actually becomes much easier to read and the language becomes highly expressive, helped somewhat by the insane integration into the firm's systems.
I was on your side until I tried it, but it can actually be quite useful, esp. if everything is consistent.
- enriquto 6y ago> I was on your side until I tried it, but it can actually be quite useful, esp. if everything is consistent. On my side? You cannot imagine how extreme one can be... If I had my way, programming languages would only allow single-letter variables and space would be the multiplication operator.
- nerdponx 6y agoWhat possible justification could you have for making this mandatory? Math notation being dependent on single-character names is an artifact of "concatenation as multiplication" -- which in my opinion is a useful but sloppy historical convention with little merit or relevance in non-handwritten media.
- necrotic_comp 6y agoOkay - I wasn't meaning to pick a fight here. Just saying that there are definite use cases where spaces in variable names can work and actually be useful. That's all.