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Comment by ef4 | Hacker News Reader

You can't talk about sensible naming without also talking about scope.

When a variable is only in scope for five lines, it's perfectly reasonable to give it a really short name.

Agreed, the best variable name is the shortest one that's still specific within its scope. A variable name of CustomerWhoHasPlacedTheMostOrdersOnThisDay is quite bad inside a three-line function, just as "public static customer" is terrible in a five thousand lines factory class that has no obvious relation with a specific customer.

the five thousand lines factory class is the real problem.

Nobody said anything against really short names.

The same argument applies to non-descriptive names, and the main complaint about short names is that they are often not descriptive.

I like to bring up the English language in this particular debate. "It", "he", and "she" are incredibly non-descriptive names, but each one of them is used many orders of magnitude more often than any "descriptive" name (other than maybe "I" or "you") and yet we don't hear rants about that.

The reason is exactly what the original commenter pointed out - scope. Sometimes the word "it" is descriptive enough all by itself. Other times it isn't. It's a more subtle matter than "worst variable names".

> Sometimes the word "it" is descriptive enough all by itself. Other times it isn't. It's a more subtle matter than "worst variable names".

I see what you did there.

You don't consider "data".length() == 4 to be short?

Nobody said anything against really short names, the article argues against non-descriptive variable names, whether short or long.

Indeed, provided you know the problem domain, the most descriptive name (xs, x_rms) is almost always far shorter than the literal alternative (horizontal_positions, quadratic_mean_of_horizontal_positions).

Why are you working under the assumption that that was his issue with the term data? Especially when he specifically described his problems with it.

I'm not. Rather, I'm supporting the notion that as the relevant scope decreases, the weight of his objections to the variable name 'data' vanish and become dominated by the value of its brevity.

Mathematicians solve for x, not for $unknown_quantity.

OT, but I do believe one of the important reasons why many people considered math hard is one letter names.

Optimizing for writing is not optimizing for reading.

I have to fully agree with you: I hate when people use 'unknown_quantity' instead of a simple 'x' as a simple line become very long and hard to read with the important informations spread over a very large area.

Having to frequently parse very long name who doesn't give more informations is very painful, and generally make the real information harder to understand.

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