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How to name things in programming

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Re: How to name things in programming

#31

Post by ttty »

jacquesm wrote: post #23
ttty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

int n = 42; int acc = 0; Fixed Edit: Install http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/alignment and add this key binding `{ "keys": ["ctrl+shift+a"], "command": "alignment" }`.

That's actually right against the style guideline of many projects which tell you explicitly not to do this but to simply put the = sign and value right after the variable name and be done with it. Lining them up serves no purpose and does not in fact make the code easier to read.

To be honest it actually makes code cleaner and therefore easier to read. It's like design have you heard about grid? this is the same thing. Your eyes have to flow the lines. If not everything seems a mess.

Re: How to name things in programming

#32

Post by rumcajz »

kabouseng wrote: post #29
rumcajz wrote: post #22

Nice write-up. But there's not a single slide about usability and how it affects naming. If your library exposes 'getCurrentRuntimeContext' which is going to be used in every other line of user's code, name it 'ctx'. It's ambiguous, but it saves the user 3 seconds per 2 lines of code. As for the readability, when the reader encounteres 'ctx' for the third time (at line 6 of the source file) they will already know wha…

I'm not so sure that is good advice, and I come from C programming so we love to do that. With autocompletion in most code editors saving the user typing time is not a valid argument anymore, and I would rather prefer comprehensible if slightly more verbose code than accronyms everywhere. What is obviously ctx -> getCurrentRuntimeContext for you is completely foreign to the next guy. And sometimes you don't spend a l…

Imagine Ritchie & Thompson would have taken the above advice and named ++ operator "increment(x)".

That would suck in a big way.

Re: How to name things in programming

#33

Post by mappu »

scrollaway wrote: post #21
ttty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

int n = 42; int acc = 0; Fixed Edit: Install http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/alignment and add this key binding `{ "keys": ["ctrl+shift+a"], "command": "alignment" }`.

Which, when you add a third variable "stuff", will require you to go back and add a space for both n and acc, pollutting both the diffs themselves (making reviews harder) and the git-blame (making pinpointing bugs harder).

    git diff -w

Re: How to name things in programming

#34

Post by cies »

Thanks for the thorough write-up Peter! This pack of slides addresses "naming things" to depth that it could have been a little book...

I miss a few things though.

1. Short functions can use abbrevs; because I can keep track of them.

2. "text_correction_by_editor" might convey a lot more info then "edit"; especially in code where "edit" (and derivative) are heavily overloaded. For instance I can imagine "text_correction_by_user" also exists, or "text_reload_by_editor".

3. Then the Java'isms. E.g. AbstractWhateverSomethingManager. This is more part of the language, paradigm (OO w/ big love for design patterns) and type of money used to pay for development (enterprise money). Its verbose, deterministic and very "correct". Once you are used to the jargon you quickly know what they do, as they explicitly encode one of more patterns in their name.

Re: How to name things in programming

#36

Post by jacquesm »

ttty wrote: post #31
jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually right against the style guideline of many projects which tell you explicitly not to do this but to simply put the = sign and value right after the variable name and be done with it. Lining them up serves no purpose and does not in fact make the code easier to read.

To be honest it actually makes code cleaner and therefore easier to read. It's like design have you heard about grid? this is the same thing. Your eyes have to flow the lines. If not everything seems a mess.

Ask your revision control system what it thinks about that and your teammates when you submit a 500 line diff for review when a 10 liner would suffice. That's only marginally better than someone checking in a diff when their editor converted tabs to spaces or vv.

Whitespace edits are the code equivalence of wikipedia formatting changes to increase the number of articles you've worked on without actually contributing anything.

Also, if you think that is easier to read you are actually setting yourself up by being deceived by formatting because you'll be skipping bits based on assuming you know what they say. Those are hard lessons to learn but the best way to understand a new piece of code that you're reading is not to read it like a book but like a machine, with a pencil and a notepad tracing the values of the variables as you execute the code in your head (or on the paper if it gets complex). You don't need to run the whole program that way, just the sections that you feel are hard to understand.

Re: How to name things in programming

#37

Post by dghf »

One Clojure style guide actually recommends[0] certain single-letter names for input parameters: x and y for numbers, n for an integer, s for a string, f (and g and h) for functions. These are used in the clojure.core namespace, and their use elsewhere is thus (presumably) justified by a general common understanding of their meanings.

[0] https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style-guide#naming

Re: How to name things in programming

#38

Post by scrollaway »

ttty wrote: post #30
scrollaway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which, when you add a third variable "stuff", will require you to go back and add a space for both n and acc, pollutting both the diffs themselves (making reviews harder) and the git-blame (making pinpointing bugs harder).

There is a plugin in sublime text that I just select the lines and hit ctrl+shift+a and alignes everything in one hit.

The way you realign your variables is inconsequential to the pain it causes your teammates (and potentially yourself) come time to look at the diff.

And yes, I know about git diff -w, but 1. not all tools built around git support it and 2. not everybody uses git.

Re: How to name things in programming

#39

Post by MichaelBurge »

tomjen3 wrote: post #5

I clicked through the first twenty or so slides, but really I find myself disagreeing completely with him. When you write don't use cliches but the meaning of AbstractConfigProxyFactory is clear and convey more information than anything else.

An AbstractConfigProxyFactory is a base class or interface for creating factory classes that return configuration objects(possibly lazily - through a proxy object - in order to avoid unnecessary disk IO or network traffic).

Two cases where you might want different factory classes(and hence need a common interface or base) are a factory for 'production' code and a factory that only generates mock objects for unit tests.

Having spent 5 minutes trying to understand what this class might do, I disagree with your claim that the name is clear.

Re: How to name things in programming

#40

Post by mc808 »

ttty wrote: post #31
jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually right against the style guideline of many projects which tell you explicitly not to do this but to simply put the = sign and value right after the variable name and be done with it. Lining them up serves no purpose and does not in fact make the code easier to read.

To be honest it actually makes code cleaner and therefore easier to read. It's like design have you heard about grid? this is the same thing. Your eyes have to flow the lines. If not everything seems a mess.

I vote for harder to read (and write), except when the variables are so tightly coupled that they should probably be in an array or other structure anyway.

But ideally this is something that should be decided by each developer's personal editor config, like tab widths for indentation.

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