5 ms·

As usual, silly little phrases like this are just silly. Lots of things are tradeoffs, but not everything. For example, picking good variable names doesn't in

As usual, silly little phrases like this are just silly. Lots of things are tradeoffs, but not everything. For example, picking good variable names doesn't involve any tradeoffs.

larksimian 13y ago
Picking takes time. It might be a small trade-off or you might be able to pay the cost only once by building up a habit of standardizing your variable names but still.
fhars 13y ago
Well, of course. But what is good? C.f. https://twitter.com/paskow/status/398811660057837568 https://twitter.com/paskow/status/398811660057837568
RogerL 13y ago
length of name vs completeness capturing scope vs ignoring it (foo.foo_thing vs foo.thing) capturing type vs ignoring it (studentList vs students) and so on. I often struggle with competing desires in naming. Code Complete dedicates an entire chapter to variable naming.
- crpatino 13y ago
  In the same vein, length of name vs abundance of other candidate tokens of the same length. By example, in C language, there are only 52 possible one-character names (26 if you stick to the convention of using only lower case characters), 5263 two-character names, 5263^2 three-character names, etc, etc. It follows that shorter names should be reserved for more restricted scopes where additional context is available. i.e. the use of "i" and "j" as a conventional names for counters, "x" and "y" for arithmetic operands, and "N" for the number of elements in a collection is a good thing. On the other hand, the use of terse names like "atoi" in standard library is terrible, because its scope is in all existing programs (or at least in all C modules that directly or indirectly include stdlib.h
blktiger 13y ago
Picking variable names can definitely involve tradeoffs. For example, how long the variable name will be could be a tradeoff based on how much information the rest of your team has about the context in which the variable will be used. Do you need a variable to be very long so as to explicitly spell out a lot of details about itself? Is a very short name (such as i for iteration) acceptable in the current context?
011011100 13y ago
I get the impression that the priority, among a large crowd here, is to say profound things rather than true things.

As usual, silly little phrases like this are just silly. Lots of things are tradeoffs, but not everything. For example, picking good variable names doesn't involve any tradeoffs.

larksimian 13y ago

Picking takes time. It might be a small trade-off or you might be able to pay the cost only once by building up a habit of standardizing your variable names but still.

fhars 13y ago

Well, of course. But what is good? C.f. https://twitter.com/paskow/status/398811660057837568 https://twitter.com/paskow/status/398811660057837568

RogerL 13y ago

length of name vs completeness capturing scope vs ignoring it (foo.foo_thing vs foo.thing) capturing type vs ignoring it (studentList vs students) and so on. I often struggle with competing desires in naming. Code Complete dedicates an entire chapter to variable naming.

crpatino 13y ago
In the same vein, length of name vs abundance of other candidate tokens of the same length. By example, in C language, there are only 52 possible one-character names (26 if you stick to the convention of using only lower case characters), 5263 two-character names, 5263^2 three-character names, etc, etc. It follows that shorter names should be reserved for more restricted scopes where additional context is available. i.e. the use of "i" and "j" as a conventional names for counters, "x" and "y" for arithmetic operands, and "N" for the number of elements in a collection is a good thing. On the other hand, the use of terse names like "atoi" in standard library is terrible, because its scope is in all existing programs (or at least in all C modules that directly or indirectly include stdlib.h

blktiger 13y ago

Picking variable names can definitely involve tradeoffs. For example, how long the variable name will be could be a tradeoff based on how much information the rest of your team has about the context in which the variable will be used. Do you need a variable to be very long so as to explicitly spell out a lot of details about itself? Is a very short name (such as i for iteration) acceptable in the current context?

011011100 13y ago

I get the impression that the priority, among a large crowd here, is to say profound things rather than true things.