• IphtashuFitz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Many years ago I had to try to debug a memory manager written by a really talented software engineer, with an interesting take on naming things…

    • He referred to blocks of memory as “cookies”.

    • He had a temporary variable named “handy” because it was handy to have around.

    • He had a second temporary variable that referenced the first one that he called “son_of_handy”.

    • If corruption was detected in a block of memory then it would set the flag “shit_cookie_corrupt”.

    • If too many cookies were corrupt then the system would halt by calling the function “oh_shit_oh_shit_oh_shit”.

    • resin85@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Any one who worked on an Oracle DB when they had the 30 character object name limit learned to make names like this. You’d figure out all your domain objects, and abbreviate them all (person could be PRS_, account could be ACCT_, etc). It was a horrible experience.

      • Knusper@feddit.de
        0·
        1 year ago

        I mean, sure, but it’s not like that makes you forget the normal English words. Just don’t abbreviate those words and you’ve likely got a semi-decent variable name.

        Well, and my expectation for non-shit seniors is to be somewhat good at their job and to lead by example.

  • Pxtl@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Hah, I (a Sr developer at the time) once built an entire mapping layer in our ETL system to deal with the fact that our product had long and expressive names for every data point but our scientists used statistical tools that had no autocomplete and choked on variable names longer than 32 chars so they named everything in like 8 chars of disemvoweled nonsense.