The thing about the arguments to an http.HandlerFunc is that everyone uses w and r for the argument names because everyone else does. Additionally, if you're wr

The thing about the arguments to an http.HandlerFunc is that everyone uses w and r for the argument names because everyone else does. Additionally, if you're writing a http.HandlerFunc, you're likely repeatedly exposed to a bunch of other http.HandlerFuncs in standard library code and gorilla/mux, all of which use w and r. Because of this, anyone who's been wrangling HandlerFuncs for more than a few days tends to converge on w and r. At this point it's no more a problem than using short variables like d for distance or r for radius in math formulas. As an aside, I have a file open right now with a struct member called "TentativeSpacesPerIndent int"; I'm not worried — yet — about how ungainly long it is because I'm still trying to figure out what indices I need to keep track of, and the last thing I want to do is confuse myself into using one type of index when I need another, or perhaps I need to track of something else entirely. On the other hand, I have func NewScanner(bs []byte) Scanner and all the thought I put into the name of the argument is "if a single byte should be a 'b', what should a slice of bytes be? 'bs'." That seems to be sufficient length for a five-line function.