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Comment by reidjs | Hacker News Reader

Loved how short and to the point it was. If you don’t have time to watch, the idea is it’s incredibly rare for two devs to come up with the same names for vars. To increase the odds of coming up with the same names for vars, you should agree on naming conventions (name molds) as a team. Sounds obvious, but great science is often confirmations or denials of the obvious.

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Patterns in the way code looks in general are invaluable for parsing code quickly especially in areas that you're somewhat familiar with. You can discard/ignore big chunks of code very quickly and go straight to where you think the relevant part is if they look as you'd expect at a glance. If they don't, it's sort of like a cache miss. "What the hell why don't people autoformat their goddamn files before saving" and then read those bits of code just to make sure they're not hiding any surprises, before formatting them properly.

It's the difference between taking, say, 2 seconds to read a method, and 10 or more.

I can only assume people who don't treat code formatting as a rule read every.single.thing.line.by.line.every.time.

> I can only assume people who don't treat code formatting as a rule read every.single.thing.line.by.line.every.time.

That's why I assume too. I don't understand how one can code like that.

Unpopular opinion: if big chunks of code look “the same”, that might be unnecessary boilerplate you should get rid of.

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