3 ms·

Just inertia from the times where teletypes were a thing. As in, a mechanical printer that served as your console. When you have that as your interface you want

Just inertia from the times where teletypes were a thing. As in, a mechanical printer that served as your console. When you have that as your interface you want to keep things terse. Even after that you had compilers with limits like 6 character names for a symbol. Those constraints went away, but names made to be comfortable for the users of teletypes and ancient compilers stuck around, and people made more of them because it fit the preexisting theme. And now it's just plain inertia, where it keeps on going because that's what it looks like in the books, so students imitate it.

mhitza 3y ago
> Just inertia from the times where teletypes were a thing. As in, a mechanical printer that served as your console. That's more than inertia, that seems to cross the threshold for ceremony. When was the last time that actual printers/teletypes were used, the 60s? The inwrtia part of it is people imitating what they already see on a project (cause why would you disrupt something as a newcomer on a project) and line length rules which I've seen come up from time to time along the years (not sure if a 120 character line length is enforced nowadays within the kernel)
- MobiusHorizons 3y ago
  There are benefits to keeping code less far to the right on the line for easy reading. I review a fair bit of code these days, and I’ve never once wished someone used more characters for their variable names. Long variable names have a tendency to make the code they are part of wrap a lot and become hard to read. I think a lot of people think that a verbose variable name is always better, so they end up lazy and don’t try to figure out what makes the variable interesting in context.
RhysU 3y ago
As a lingua franca, it's culturally reasonable. After you've grokked it the first time, e.g. "dgemm" is much more convenient than "double precision general matrix multiplication". This is akin to speaking aloud "DC" versus "The District of Columbia". Uses far outweigh learning. Consider even Python calls it a "dict" not a "dictionary" because the latter is a mouthful. Though what was wrong with "map" I often wonder.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > Consider even Python calls it a "dict" not a "dictionary" because the latter is a mouthful. Though what was wrong with "map" I often wonder. A conflict with the map() function maybe?
arp242 3y ago
> Just inertia from the times where teletypes were a thing No. I like these names as it's just easier to read. fp or fd is short and to the point, and "filePointer" or variants thereof add noting except more characters to read, more "wall of text"-y code that's harder to scan, etc. And I don't really want to have a discussion about it as such; whatever your preference is that fine. I'll be happy to adjust to whatever works well within a team. But I wish people would stop spreading nonsense like this to invalidate other people's preferences.

mhitza 3y ago

> Just inertia from the times where teletypes were a thing. As in, a mechanical printer that served as your console. That's more than inertia, that seems to cross the threshold for ceremony. When was the last time that actual printers/teletypes were used, the 60s? The inwrtia part of it is people imitating what they already see on a project (cause why would you disrupt something as a newcomer on a project) and line length rules which I've seen come up from time to time along the years (not sure if a 120 character line length is enforced nowadays within the kernel)

MobiusHorizons 3y ago
There are benefits to keeping code less far to the right on the line for easy reading. I review a fair bit of code these days, and I’ve never once wished someone used more characters for their variable names. Long variable names have a tendency to make the code they are part of wrap a lot and become hard to read. I think a lot of people think that a verbose variable name is always better, so they end up lazy and don’t try to figure out what makes the variable interesting in context.

RhysU 3y ago

As a lingua franca, it's culturally reasonable. After you've grokked it the first time, e.g. "dgemm" is much more convenient than "double precision general matrix multiplication". This is akin to speaking aloud "DC" versus "The District of Columbia". Uses far outweigh learning. Consider even Python calls it a "dict" not a "dictionary" because the latter is a mouthful. Though what was wrong with "map" I often wonder.

dale_glass 3y ago
> Consider even Python calls it a "dict" not a "dictionary" because the latter is a mouthful. Though what was wrong with "map" I often wonder. A conflict with the map() function maybe?

arp242 3y ago

> Just inertia from the times where teletypes were a thing No. I like these names as it's just easier to read. fp or fd is short and to the point, and "filePointer" or variants thereof add noting except more characters to read, more "wall of text"-y code that's harder to scan, etc. And I don't really want to have a discussion about it as such; whatever your preference is that fine. I'll be happy to adjust to whatever works well within a team. But I wish people would stop spreading nonsense like this to invalidate other people's preferences.