this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Programming

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[–] eager_eagle 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

The liberty to not name things that are obvious.

and that's yet another way to end up with hard to read code.

Variables hold values that have meaning. Learn how to name things and you'll write good code.

edit: someone just wrote an article along these lines. The only thing I'd change is the cause-effect relationship between bad names and bad code. IME bad names lead to bad code, not usually the other way around. The reason is that by starting from good name choices, it's much easier to have a well structured code. And not rarely, bad names lead to mangled up code that screams for a refactoring.

[–] exussum 1 points 1 year ago (9 children)

This makes me want to write a function for you to add to numbers where the variables are leftumber and rightnumber, instead of x and y.

[–] eager_eagle 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

if "left" and "right" were relevant for addition, they would indeed be better names

[–] exussum 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you against using a single letter variable like e for element in iterating over things?

[–] eager_eagle 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] exussum 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To each their own. But man imagine if you have a collection of stuff that has a large name, and then having to figure out a short name other than e when iterating. I hope you're not iterating over chemical names 😬

[–] eager_eagle 3 points 1 year ago

No need to be over-descriptive. Anything at all more specific than e will probably be a better name

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