Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

I just use a UUID for every variable name to make sure the codebase never has any ambiguity.

No one is going to confuse e7693160-b5cf-4761-9202-de019cfd0fc9 with c3d8b9ac-d0da-4bbc-912b-025ce4e47f62

A good name has maximal information density. If the string is compressible, you're wasting your reader's time. That's why I use all utf-8 glyphs to render my uniformly random and highly informative (from an information theory standpoint) variable names.

You joke but symbolic programming languages like APL are kinda neat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_syntax_and_symbols

I do see this more often in UTF8 native platforms.

arr1 and arr2 might use subscripts for 1 and 2 with no side effect on plan9.

Why use "delta" when writing a delta symbol is so easy?

Julia not only supports Unicode, but embraces it culturally. You indeed very often see Δ in Julia code.

A good name is also memorable, consistent, easily decipherable, and works around namespace conflicts. Might be a best 2.7 out of 4 situation, I guess. Why 2.7/4 and not 3/4? Because the remainder was lost in translation to the ASCII gods.

This implies your code has fewer than 2¹²² variables. A real coder should have more than that in each method. Sounds like you're basically a glorified VB "dev."

you're basically a glorified VB "dev."

How did you know?! Actually it's probably not far from the truth... most of the code I write is more like scripts in R & Python and small utilities than fully-fledged applications. And lots of SQL. I glue a bunch of stuff together, and after that is where my real job begins. I used to have a bit more fun writing C code to work around the limitations of an ancient ERP: that system's foundations literally extended back to before the moon landing and long before I was born.

I once ported a 3rd party telecommunication middleware stack to a new OS. Every single function was 12 characters long, 4 fields of 3 characters each. Each field had meaning, but I wasn't given the decoder ring.

That was not fun.

There's some usefulness in this idea, which is the core idea behind Unison https://www.unisonweb.org/docs/tour

You could rename the functions to match their symbols, after compiling.

The output of nm for the function originally named "write" from musl libc might look like

   000000000006ee20 T 000000000006ee20

Actually, you'd be really surprised about that: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1229641258370355200

lol

Reply on news.ycombinator.com