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So to extend your breadboard analogy, Hungarian says you should have a dictionary of colors and everyone should learn the colors, since coloring a wire provides
by gfodor 13y ago
So to extend your breadboard analogy, Hungarian says you should have a dictionary of colors and everyone should learn the colors, since coloring a wire provides an informationally-dense, well suited way of expressing information un-ambiguously to those versed in the wire color convention. Non-Hungarian says you should attach a sticker with a small free-form written sentence explaining what each wire does, and each person can have their own general style for how they write these things, but the upside is they are intuitive and everyone can read them without learning a color dictionary.
In either case the labeling/coloring of the wire is not fundamentally enforcing the wire's use, but experts are better served by conventions that may take time to adopt but convey information as efficiently as possible given the medium they must be used in.
- tel 13y agoI'm definitely not trying to defend the stickers, nor do I feel that taking this argument to its ultimate point retains any logic. My argument is that colors and tags are both potentially misleading, while the actual information and structure comes out of their connectivity diagram. Any time you put trust in anything else you're trading off safety for convenience. That isn't a bad thing, but it's a tradeoff that should be done conscientiously. Finally, I think it's illustrative to think about what would happen without HN (or, in analogy, without colored wires or little tags) because that drives you to solve the harder problem of how to represent the connectivity diagram of a breadboard directly, expressively, and in a way that solves the problems people face when building them. Analysis trumps documentation, except when it doesn't or is too expensive.