Most of this, even if it's not my preference, I would never bother arguing with. But I have a question about a practice that is tremendously widespread. I have real trouble with single-letter variable names like "c", for any function more than, say, 2-3 lines. I scan the code and it increases my mental load because I have to remind myself what it means. Obviously a lot of people don't have problems with this, but I d…
I agree. It's not a mental tax to read a word we recognize. It's not like we have to sound it out letter by letter, we recognize its form at a glance. It's more taxing to maintain a mapping for an inherently meaningless single character. Although there are some single characters that do have meaning due to long time convention such as 'i'.
For example:
function flip(func) {
return function(x, y) {
return func(y, x);
};
}
function compose(func1, func2) {
return function(x) {
return func1(func2(x));
};
}
Would it be better to call them something like `arg`, or `arg1` and `arg2`? The fact they're arguments is obvious, so that would be just as redundant as something like `int int1 = ...`.
This kind of generic "plumbing" appears all the time when using a functional style, where our function's job is to take in a bunch of values and combine them in some way, without caring what they are.