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Search - "funny variable names"
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Well... I had in over 15 years of programming a lot of PHP / HTML projects where I asked myself: What psychopath could have written this?
(PHP haters: Just go trolling somewhere else...)
In my current project I've "inherited" a project which was running around ~ 15 years. Code Base looked solid to me... (Article system for ERP, huge company / branches system, lot of other modules for internal use... All in all: Not small.)
The original goal was to port to PHP 7 and to give it a fresh layout. Seemed doable...
The first days passed by - porting to an asset system, cleaning up the base system (login / logout / session & cookies... you know the drill).
And that was where it all went haywire.
I really have no clue how someone could have been so ignorant to not even think twice before setting cookies or doing other "header related" stuff without at least checking the result codes...
Basically the authentication / permission system was fully fucked up. It relied on redirecting the user via header modification to the login page with an error set in a GET variable...
Uh boy. That ain't funny.
Ported to session flash messages, checked if headers were sent, hard exit otherwise - redirect.
But then I got to the first layers of the whole "OOP class" related shit...
It's basically "whack a mole".
Whoever wrote this, was as dumb and as ignorant to build up a daisy chain of commands for fixing corner cases of corner cases of the regular command... If you don't understand what I mean, take the following example:
Permissions are based on group (accumulation of single permissions) and single permissions - to get all permissions from a user, you need to fetch both and build a unique array.
Well... The "names" for permissions are not unique. I'd never expected to be someone to be so stupid. Yes. You could have two permissions name "article_search" - while relying on uniqueness.
All in all all permissions are fetched once for lifetime of script and stored to a cache...
To fix this corner case… There is another function that fetches the results from the cache and returns simply "one" of the rights (getting permission array).
In case you need to get the ID of the other (yes... two identifiers used in the project for permissions - name and ID (auto increment key))...
Let's write another function on top of the function on top of the function.
My brain is seriously in deep fried mode.
Untangling this mess is basically like getting pumped up with pain killers and trying to solve logic riddles - it just doesn't work....
So... From redesigning and porting from PHP 7 I'm basically rewriting the whole base system to MVC, porting and touching every script, untangling this dumb shit of "functions" / "OOP" [or whatever you call this garbage] and then hoping everything works...
A huge thanks to AURA. http://auraphp.com/
It's incredibily useful in this case, as it has no dependencies and makes it very easy to get a solid ground without writing a whole framework by myself.
Amen.2 -
Saw a counting variable in code. It was a necessary counting variable, so that is not what this is about.
However, this is a US based company that has a somewhat PC (no cursing) and professional cultural facade.
This variable was called "cnt". How the hell did that one not get caught in peer review? I have gotten dinged for having "possibly offensive" variable names (think Point5Hit though I have never written that as a variable name). It was funny. But I have changed it because that's just lazy.9 -
Any other language: Hey fuckface, you can't name this variable by a single letter, tf is wrong with you? use some descriptive shit.
Golang: lmao fuck u
I really find it interesting how we use short variable names for items in golang. Kinda makes sense when you think of it. Most of these items come up in short methods for which the mental model lets you know and remember what you are doing, they even make sense when going through the std lib in which that shit is all over the place. YET years of going by other languages has made me squint my eyes a bit in frustration every time I see it.
Say for example that a function is implementing io.Writer. What would you call the method parameter? you could argue that writer would be sensible since it has it in the signature, but what about when the io.Writer in itself is a file or a socket or whatever? writer would be funny or strange? nah fuck it just w, it makes sense, but x wouldn't. I find these points to make sense even if i don't like them.
Would, now, this practice be acceptable in C? you are supposed to write the same modular code with C in which you compose large functionality in separated units of code, yet I am sure this practice of single name variables is something that C engineers dislike greatly.
Are go devs just doing this out of blind love for their preference in languages? and how would this work if mfkers add generics to go(I hope not, Go is simple enough to understand in order to extend functionality through the empty interface, but that is a preference of mine as well)
The more I use Go the more I like it to be honest, I think the code looks ugly syntactically, but that is subjective as all hell and based on my constant preference for a language to look like Ruby, which even though it might not be everyone's cup of tea it remains to my eyes as the most beautiful language in existence, again, an obvious personal preference.18 -
back into some quick and dirty opencv scripting for the afternoon to try to get a report out the door, and boyhave my variable names become, shall we say, gigidy inspiring:
longexposure = np.uint8(cumimage/float(len(ims)))
stacked = np.hstack({cumimage, longexposure})