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Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#71
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native english speaker, math major. This seems really awesome! I feel like descriptive, long variable names have both an advantage and a disadvantage: advantage, obviously, that they're clear, but disadvantage that simply having all that filler text everywhere begins to make the code harder to follow in a serious way. So there's always this tug-of-war between short variable names that make flow easy to follow but req…

I use long variable names all the time and it's never actually made the code harder to follow. You generally parse a whole word as a shape rather than one letter at a time anyway once you know the word, so effectively the only difference is a bit more horizontal space. If someone grew up using whole words as variables in math I doubt they'd find single characters easier to work with. For programming, using characters…

I'll just say this definitely doesn't agree with my experience, though it's certainly the kind of thing that might differ from person to person, brain to brain.

Here's one thought experiment: imagine variables get longer and longer and longer. Clearly, at some point, they become so long that they're much more unwieldy to work with. Now it's just a question of, as they get shorter, when do the gains start to become insignificant?

(Re QWERTY: Ease of input is certainly a consideration, but hardly an insurmountable problem. We should not forever restrict ourselves to basic latin because that's what happens to be printed on many physical keyboards at this moment.)

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#72
It only approximates the date you first joined. It uses https://archive.org/ (the Internet Archive) to load the archived page nearest to (or nearest before?) the date you joined. Since the Internet Archive does not mirror HN every day, the page it will show you may differ by a few days from your exact signup date. It so happens that I joined on March 11, 2009 but I was shown the page for March 10, 2009 instead. You can use http://www.waybackhn.com/ to get a list of the top stories on the exact date you joined HN.

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

結果 = result (a term / expression with figurative meaning) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B5%90%E6%9E%9C It looks like those characters literally mean "to bear fruit" - and in English, fruit is also used figuratively to mean a result, e.g. "fruits of labour", so I wonder if either English or Chinese was inspired by the other, or if they independently came up with the concept relating fruit and result.

My bet is independently. Spanish also has the same expression and I bet lots of other languages do too.

The Spanish and English dual meaning both comes from latin, so the similarity in other languages with influence from latin does not provide any evidence in support of this idea developing independently (nor does it provide evidence against it).

Looking up the Chinese etymology seems to imply both the Latin and Chinese probably came to have the dual use for the same reason (agriculture leading to equating labour with resulting in fruit/produce), without any obvious direct connection.

Who knows... It does seem a quite logical step for new agricultural societies to make that connection.

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#76
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native english speaker, math major. This seems really awesome! I feel like descriptive, long variable names have both an advantage and a disadvantage: advantage, obviously, that they're clear, but disadvantage that simply having all that filler text everywhere begins to make the code harder to follow in a serious way. So there's always this tug-of-war between short variable names that make flow easy to follow but req…

I use long variable names all the time and it's never actually made the code harder to follow. You generally parse a whole word as a shape rather than one letter at a time anyway once you know the word, so effectively the only difference is a bit more horizontal space. If someone grew up using whole words as variables in math I doubt they'd find single characters easier to work with. For programming, using characters…

I doubt anyone can really parse grails.plugin.searchable.internal.compass.mapping.SearchableGrailsDomainClassCompassClassMapperFactory [1] as a shape.

[1] https://github.com/gpc/searchable/blob/master/src/java/grail...

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#78
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use long variable names all the time and it's never actually made the code harder to follow. You generally parse a whole word as a shape rather than one letter at a time anyway once you know the word, so effectively the only difference is a bit more horizontal space. If someone grew up using whole words as variables in math I doubt they'd find single characters easier to work with. For programming, using characters…

I doubt anyone can really parse grails.plugin.searchable.internal.compass.mapping.SearchableGrailsDomainClassCompassClassMapperFactory [1] as a shape. [1] https://github.com/gpc/searchable/blob/master/src/java/grail...

😱

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#80
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native english speaker, math major. This seems really awesome! I feel like descriptive, long variable names have both an advantage and a disadvantage: advantage, obviously, that they're clear, but disadvantage that simply having all that filler text everywhere begins to make the code harder to follow in a serious way. So there's always this tug-of-war between short variable names that make flow easy to follow but req…

I use long variable names all the time and it's never actually made the code harder to follow. You generally parse a whole word as a shape rather than one letter at a time anyway once you know the word, so effectively the only difference is a bit more horizontal space. If someone grew up using whole words as variables in math I doubt they'd find single characters easier to work with. For programming, using characters…

I think long names are relative. Jokes like these[1] don't come from a vacuum. I've seen serious code with sentence-long variable names before, and it does make it hard for me to read at a glance.

[1] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

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