Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, classic HN Saturday morning - finding myself dreaming up Hungarian notation in English to disambiguate grammatical types nTime vFlies avLike an nArrow, nFruit vFlies avLike a nBanana It's ugly but if we all adhere to this convention and haze our juniors, we'll eliminate most our problems
As someone who speaks Hungarian, but never seen Hungarian notation outside the context of programming, I'm suddenly realizing that Hungarian notation is probably named after how the Hungarian language itself works. Words in Hungarian have specific endings that change their "grammatical type" (I forget the grammatical term for that... part of speech?) Some examples: 1. "-ás/-és": Transforms a verb into a noun that den…
> The original Hungarian notation was invented by Charles Simonyi, a programmer who worked at Xerox PARC circa 1972–1981, and who later became Chief Architect at Microsoft. The name of the notation is a reference to Simonyi's nation of origin, and also, according to Andy Hertzfeld, because it made programs "look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language". Hungarian people's names are "reversed" compared to most other European names; the family name precedes the given name. For example, the anglicized name "Charles Simonyi" in Hungarian was originally "Simonyi Károly". In the same way, the type name precedes the "given name" in Hungarian notation. The similar Smalltalk "type last" naming style (e.g. aPoint and lastPoint) was common at Xerox PARC during Simonyi's tenure there.
> Simonyi's paper on the notation referred to prefixes used to indicate the "type" of information being stored. His proposal was largely concerned with decorating identifier names based upon the semantic information of what they store (in other words, the variable's purpose). Simonyi's notation came to be called Apps Hungarian, since the convention was used in the applications division of Microsoft. Systems Hungarian developed later in the Microsoft Windows development team. Apps Hungarian is not entirely distinct from what became known as Systems Hungarian, as some of Simonyi's suggested prefixes contain little or no semantic information (see below for examples).
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Simonyi's native language may have had some impact on how he wrote code, but it was not "human language -> write code like Hungarian -> Hungarian notation".
https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/01/01/227178/anything-...
> The resulting code was dense and hard to read. Simonyi’s system came to be known as Hungarian notation, both in homage to its creator’s birthplace and because it made programs “look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language,” according to programming pioneer Andy Hertzfeld. Hungarian is widely cursed by its detractors. Canadian Java expert Roedy Green has jokingly called it “the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques.” Mozilla programmer Alec Flett wrote this parody:
prepBut nI vrbLike adjHungarian! qWhat’s artThe adjBig nProblem?