Older C compilers would truncate a variable name if it was too long, so
VeryLongGlobalConstantInsideALibraryInSecondsmight accidentally collide withVeryLongGlobalConstantInsideALibraryInMinutes.Legend says that they used to do it after a single letter with Dennis declaring “26 variables ought to be enough for anyone”.
FullSentenceExplainingExactlyWhatItDoes(GiveThisVariable, SoItCanWork)Then you realize your code is undebuggable because half the functions and variables have single-letter names or called
foo,bar,baz, etc.I have a somewhat related real world story. I had a client that was convinced that tons of people were going to decompile their application and sell their own version of the program, so they insisted that they needed their code obfuscated to protect company secrets and make it harder to reverse engineer. I tried explaining to them that obfuscation wasn’t that big of a deterrent to someone attempting to steal code through reverse engineering and that it would likely cause some issues with debugging, but they were certain they needed it. Sure enough, they then had a real user run into an issue and were surprised to find that their custom logging system was close to useless because the application was outputting random obfuscated letters instead of function and variable names. We did have mapping files, but it took a lot of time to map each log message to make it readable enough to try to understand the user’s issue.
This is why you obfuscate after you code. Just obfuscate the release build. And logging may at that point be thrown out of the window anyway
It was obfuscated only in the release build. The issue is that they have a system to send certain logs to an API so they can refer to them if a user has an issue that needs further investigation. Unfortunately, their target audience is not very tech literate and have a hard time explaining how they got into a situation where they experienced a bug, so the remote logging was a way to allow us to try to retrace the user’s steps. Some of the logs that get sent to the API have JSON values converted from class data, will refer directly to class names, etc, and those logs had the obfuscated names.
Well then you are fucked.
The question is if nobody else has access to the logs, then obfuscation is stupid
I worked with a developer who insisted on using the shortest names possible. God I hated debugging his code.
I’m talking variable names like AAxynj. Everything looking like matrix math.
Ah, must’ve been a fortran developer. I swear they have this ability to make the shortest yet the least memorable variable names. E.g. was the variable called APFLWS or APFLWD? Impossible to remember without going back and forth to recheck the definition. Autocomplete won’t help you because both variables exist.
And you can write more than six characters, but only the first six are recognized. So APFLWSAC and APFLWSAF are really the same variable.
And without namespaces, company policy reserves the first two characters for module prefix and Hungarian notation.
He did write some Fortran in his past! What made you think it was Fortran influence?
72 characters per line/card.
name your function as
malloc()and see to world burn and generate bugs at factorial rate.If you name it malloc it will be easy to notice. On the other hand if you call it free…
mathematician here, where is the joke?
This joke is funny only if placed in Arnold-Atyah manifold if Kolmogorov-Ramachandran-Yu metric is defined
So don’t use it in non-KRY-definite AA situations, or you could get erroneous results. QQX is fine though, as long as you have non-vanishing ABCD. /s
I wonder if Lean proofs become the new peer review like I’ve heard suggested, if mathematics might break from this, and look more compsci-ish in the future. That way non-specialists could get up to speed quickly.
in the linux community it’s really common to have applications like MPD, music player daemon, or MPC, music player client, and ncmpc, ncurses music player client, and ncmpcpp the aforementioned one with ++ tacked onto the end.
Cmus, which from what i can recall is literally “c music player”
etc…
Variable names should be “self defining” meaning you should be able to understand what its doing from the name. The name also shouldn’t be too long. Combining those together makes it difficult to come up with an “elegant” name
I think they got the joke, they were just joking about how this is common in math :P
The most atrocious variable names I ever encountered in code were as a research assistant for a math professor doing game theory simulations. Literally unreadable unless you had a copy of his paper on the subject to refer to
tmp3 = tmp1 + tmp2 ; T.T
Single character variable names are my pet peeve. I even name iterator variables a real word instead of “i” now… (although writing the OG low level for loops is kinda rare for me now)
Naming things “x”… shudder. Well, the entire world is getting to see how that idea transpires hahah
I hate short variable names in general too, but am okay with them for iterators where i and j represent only indices, and when x/y/z represent coordinates (like a for loop going over x coordinates). In most cases I actually prefer this since it keeps me from having to think about whether I’m looking at an integer iterator or object/dictionary iterator loop, as long as the loop remains short. When it gets to be ridiculous in size, even i and j are annoying. Any other short names are a no go for me though. And my god, the abbreviations… Those are the worst.
That’s very reasonable, I can get behind that. (my stance is a partly irrational overreaction and I’m totally aware of it lol)
Abbreviations are definitely annoying. My least favourite thing to do with them is “Hungarian notation”. It’s like… in a statically typed context it’s useless, and in a dynamically typed context it’s like… kind of a sign you need to refactor
Hungarian notation makes sense in a dynamically typed usage (which I despise, but this essentially makes them notationally typed at least) or where you’re editor/IDE is so simple it can’t give you more information, which I can’t see ever being the case in the modern day.
You should really be naming all your variables by generating 64 character (minimum) random strings.
Make it 63 (31?) to align with what C99 can distinguish.
Also: I really like unicode in identifiers. So if at all possible don’t just have a random string of letters and numbers, make sure to include greek letters and all the funny emojis. (I just forgot which languages and compilers etc allow that.)
For extra fun, you can name your variables using solely Unicode invisible characters (e.g. non-breaking space) so they’re impossible to visually distinguish
Who needs private variables when you can generate cryptographically secure variable names? Much better security.
No, that’s math.
for whatever in stuff:
for myList in myElement:
Nah, I name all my variables after my homies.
int dave = 0;does dave know he’s a zero?
Ok, but what variable is 🐈?
Is the function to con🐈eate and print.
Gotten even easier after X became a registered trademark. Now the only choice we have left is i. Or ii if you need more variables
“j” is what you’re supposed to use if you need another index variable after using “i”.
Okay, say you’ve got four inner loops (a crime on its own, I know), do you use i, j, k, l or i, j, k, ii?
lIIl, IIIl, lIlI and IllI
Was just talking about gaming genre names being kinda lame (roguelike? Souls-like? Where’s the originality?!) and this just furthers my point as programming and video games are intrinsically linked.
floats, doubles, etc are decimallikes. object-oriented programming languages are c++likes. a string that is just the word “false” is a boollike. any language easier to learn than c++ is a pythonlike. any language harder to learn than c++ is a asmlike. don’t like it? then you’re a naglike. you don’t want to be known as a naglike, do you?
