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Ask HN: Is hungarian notation still around?
I work in a big company, we write "mission critical" software. And many people (at least 90%) want to use hungarian notation. Because management also likes it, we MUST. The variety of notation used is prefix_NameInCamelCase_sufix where prefix is the use of the variable (like Systems hungarian) 2 to 4 chars, then the name, which typically is 4 to 6 characters, and a sufix, 2 to 4 characters, the type.
I get frustrated trying to advocate for not using it anymore.
Do you have such experience. Are you for hungarian notation? change my mind?!
- MattGaiser 4y agoI liked it before it became common to add the type to Python functions/before I used IDEs that did a lot of that work for me. Before that, I would spend a lot of time figuring out how data structures changed as the program went on. Now I view it as redundant. Are you using good tools at work? What language are you using?
- f1shy 4y agoWe are using C++ (mostly 11) for production. We use a compiler from Green Hills: https://www.ghs.com/products/compiler.html https://www.ghs.com/products/compiler.html I do not have the best love for the compiler. We have many static code analysers that are crap. For version control and "CI/CD" (we do not really do CI/CD, it only checks if it "compiles"), Azure now, migrating from Jenkins. Editor/IDE VCode is recommended, I prefer Emacs. Debugging is done by cout. Almost nobody knows what gdb is.
- MattGaiser 4y agoI am not a C++ expert, but not knowing how to use a debugger seems to explain why Hungarian might be required.
- f1shy 4y agoYes, my opinion is that both go together somehow...
- roeles 4y agoI have seen it in a VB6 codebase, but never used it. I can imagine that it is going to make refactoring interesting. Better keep everything up to date, or it can become misleading. Tooling might help with this, but this is probably the same tooling that can help you work without Hungarian notation. (vim user here, so wouldn't know). I am working on a C codebase which exclusively uses do-while loops with manual initialization and incrementing of the loop counter. Pick your battles. Lead by example if you think you know better.
- mrkeen 4y agoWhat language are you writing it in? What safety/readability is it giving you that's not provided by your compiler/IDE?