Programmer Humor

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Worse than single letters (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by qaz@lemmy.world to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

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[–] Gentoo1337@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I remember one GitHub project that implemented some algorithm (I think it was Dijkstra's) but only used 4 or 5 single letter variables and just kept reusing them.

[–] Pxtl@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Maybe they had a background in low-level assembly code? If you're writing assembly that's kinda sorta how you'd handle registers.

[–] lorty@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When you are used to math equations, it's easy to slip into that habit.

[–] Pxtl@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Single letter variables, yes. Reusing them? No.

[+] vsh@lemm.ee -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] Scraft161@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 points 1 year ago

Length might have mattered in the 80s and 90s when IDEs were crap but we got autocomplete in pretty much all our text editors (even TUI ones like vim).

As for readability there is an argument to be had in specific contexts, but 9 out of 10 times it makes more sense to use a proper word.

Example:

let list = [1, 2, 3];
for i in list {
    println!("{}", i);
}

In this case using item in the place of i would be more fitting.

[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When I was in college, I had a guy that I was working on a project with that did this constantly. At one point I looked at one of his files and the variables were named a, b, c, aa, ab, ac, ba, bb, etc. That when I was like, bro, you gotta stop doing this.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

"Inside you there are two wolves..." or something:

Option 1: Sit down with them and go line by line through it. Make him identify each variable's purpose and then immediately find and replace to rename every instance with a more descriptive name.

Option 2: Small script to shuffle the variable names in his code around after each of his commits.