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Comment by gitonthescene | Hacker News Reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31361023#31365022

Ridiculing the value of documentation does not make you look smart.

It rather hints at lack of experience with truly complex systems or collaboration in teams.

Are you saying this is a complex system or that any decisions made in the context of complex systems must be used for all software? Also, this was not in response to a post about documentation but rather a post about the file names. In any event, it says nothing about my experience and you are simply extrapolating.

You can always write documentation in comments. Using terse names for the identifiers when feasible can make it a lot easier to see the bigger picture wrt. multiple components interacting. It's a tradeoff.

Agreed, and it would probably be my preference.

The code referenced here is pretty extreme NOT providing the guidance, hence my response to the poster defending the extreme and ridiculing the good practice.

Because I can already look at a sock and see it's a sock.

If you're keen on this style, perhaps you should pack all the socks, underwear and other objects in your home into identical boxes and put labels like "~" and "z" on them.

Funnily enough, I don’t need a label for the drawer I keep my socks in. None of my drawers have labels. See what I’m saying here?

I do. You're saying you see your code as a personal posession, whose structure you know and understand. You're saying it doesn't matter how easy your code is for somebody else to get their head round because, like your sock drawer, you don't imagine other people will go rummaging around in it.

It's not an attitude I approve of in colleagues, for obvious reasons. Fortunately it's a long time since I've had to work with anyone that thinks that way. They don't survive in workplaces like mine.

Which colleagues are you talking about in this context? In any event I’ve worked for over twenty years in companies with thousands of employees and I can’t remember a single time that the name of a source file made any practical difference in my day. I think the naysayers are having their own conversations distinct from actual reality of what’s happening here. “I wouldn’t do this” is a perfectly reasonable reaction but not at all useful in a public discussion.

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