Uncle Bob said to always be verbose with your naming 👍

Came across this gold:

Q) What is the best naming prefix for a global variable?

Ans) //

Found this on fb

Naming a variable "dogFucker" in anger and accidentally committing it.

In all honesty, if there was a course on giving variables good, informative and not completely stupid names... I would take it.

So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

Debating for naming a variable be like**~

Variable naming at its best...
Took only 2 hours to notice the difference between leftToRight and lefttoRight

Variable naming conventions..

Interviewer:"what's the challenges you often face in programming?"
Me:"naming variable, class and git commit message always trouble me as I'm a perfectionist."

"How to name your variables and functions so they can be understood by other humans" should be a mandatory lesson right after someone writes their first ever computer program.

'coz you know ...

This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

------

Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

Who else does this?😂

The hardest thing about coding is variable naming

Shower Thought :
I wonder, in the future, since people is easily offended by everything, variable naming would be such a concern it'll be seriously implemented in the compiler, and be like
"Error at 16:1 NamingConventionError : 'fuckThis' is not linear with our guidelines"

College Graduate joins the team, assigned the first jira story.
Perfect logic, variable naming can be improved, but I can let that go, since the logic was good.

Rejected the implementation in fisheye because she used
if()
{
//
}
Instead of
if(){
//
}

What's wrong with me...

I have a variable called 'stuff'. It's a test to see if my colleagues really read my pull requests.

The pains of coming up with short but meaningful variable names 😣

Proud dev moment : as I was following the variable naming conventions from my company, I got to name a variable "l_o_tr" 💪

I was given a work to refactor one of my colleagues code and found that there was a variable named 'anal'. I was quite surprised seeing it as the colleague was a soft spoken and well behaved guy in office. After scratching my head for 15mins I came to know that he was storing analytics data in that variable. Hence the name! :-D

why the fuck people name variables endig with numbers? why? how the hell do you even figure out what's what?

checkStatus1
checkStatus2
checkStatusMyAss

If you ever use emojis for variable naming, please do a favor for the whole developer community by formatting your hard drive twice and then never touching a computer again - because you're an idiot.

Seriously though, why Apple? This screenshot is from the official Swift Language documentation...

Bad variable naming

working on legacy code and saw this:

@records = unpublished_collection.published

Wait, what?

Dim [Dim] As Short

Why you ask? For the glory of satan of course!

Have you ever been at that desperate point where you start naming your variable and functions into something like "pleaseWork"

Why do some variable names start with an _ in C/C++ ? I personally do not like such naming.

Remember this !

That's it, I'm done. My sincere condolences go to the poor soul that will have to maintain this complete and utter crap of code, as I have been doing the past 2 weeks.

3-4 big 4K+ lines files of completely unindented, practically undocumented, interspersed HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS! All in the same file.

All the function and variable names are complete nonsense. You might as well have smashed your head against the keyboard and let whatever came out be the names.

You took all the naming conventions that you could find and unleashed your seriously damaged imagination. lowerCamelCase, UpperCamelCase, snakecase, everything in the same fucking function name.

I really needed the money from this project. But I'm done. My mental sanity is more important that try to figure out how to make a decent and usable webpage of THIS COMPLETE DISASTER.

You, the one before me. If you wanted to make sure that no one else besides you could work with this crap, then congrats, YOU FUCKING DID IT WITH HONORS. FUCKING SUMMA CUM LAUDE. PhD and all.

According to my predecessor, naming variables is easy. You just hang a poster of the alphabet on the wall and start throwing darts. The letter you skewer is your next variable.

If you run out of letters, start again - but dual wield the darts

Today I discovered what slowed my productivity the most: variable naming.

In a project I was naming many variables 'dirname' in different parts of the my code, but it represented 3 things: only the name of the directory, relative path + directory, and absolute path + directory.

I wasted to much time just figuring out which was which everytime until I finally decided to organize variables names better and see the wonders of the world. Result:
- dirname: only the name
- reldirname: relative path + dir
- absdirname: absolute path + dir

Such simple solution, yet took me years to actually see the benefits, my god

(First devRant post btw :3)

Came across 'var3' and 'var15' while debugging Hybris. What the actual fuck SAP, since when do you hire preschoolers to code.

Did some code review the other day.
Best variable name found: pathToAss2

When one of your dev's can't keep his variable naming consistent, even within the same line. Throw in non-English comments, bad spelling and incorrect pluralization for good measure

string myVariable = THE_OTHER_VARABLE + AnotherDumbVariable
//This add the string for better working

People who write ridiculous JS variable names that are impossible to understand or are just unreadable!! WTF!! Don't tell me it's to save bytes because its getting minified anyway. You're just fucking lazy.

I'm porting code. Help.

I barely know the madness behind this - zero comments, undescriptive 2 or 3 letter variable names, matrices shown as a bunch of vec3s, inconsistent naming conventions (Fuck naming conventions when the variable names are near nonsense anyway - vs, na, ba, ca, a, b, c, Rxy/Ryr/Rzr0/1/2, cx, sx, cz, sz, n0, n1, n0v, n1v, dotrzrxry, sy to name a few).

Solution: Just copy this code, slightly adapt it to use my own inputs, and never look back on it ever ever again ever.

This code has been out and in use for over a year and some months now. Over that time, a few brave souls like me have looked at it and tried to make sense of it. No-one has dared to decode the madness behind that section this entire time.

Oh and don't even get me started on the rest of the code! 943 lines, 4 of which are comments, next to no blank spacing lines, basically zero horizonal spacing also, integers dependent on knowing exactly how much madness there is, etc.

And all the other files have basically zero comments/spacing also.

When you're naming variables, it is not acceptable for them to be one character, especially when that character bares no relevance to the information it stores.

'f' is not a good variable name for an array of strings now, is it...

Today i found variable called "booleanValue". So it IS true, that there are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things...

When it comes to the indentation or look I am fully consistent.
But when it comes to naming I am inconsistent like a crack whore telling she's clean.
Camelcase, underscores inconsistent variable and function names. I use all of them within a single file. On some days I even switch languages.
I truly am miserable in code consistency. Is there any good advice to keep the code consistent?

Ffs, I've finally finished a project where I worked with a guy who was the laziest coder I have ever worked with.
He didn't even try to come up with meaningful variable names😒.
Instead of naming a variable label1 (which is already kinda s***) he tried lbl1 but still made a typo so the actual name was ibl1.
AND HE LEFT IT LIKE THAT FOR THE REST OF THE PROGRAM!

Never know why you need to add vanilla to make vanilla. Oh wait, it's just crappy variable naming.

in personal projects, it is really easy to tell when I'm horny. you will find variable names like
- hotVar
- sluttyVar
- FUCK_ME_VAR

15 minutes after that commit naming becomes
- var

Sometimes I spend way too much time on variable names xD

Most difficult part of a programmer?
-> Naming variable

/** It takes me 2-5 mins to think

One who says "What's in a name?"
.
.
had probably never named a "variable"

Developers who think using cryptic variable names (like acronyms) is better than long descriptive variable names.....but then feel the need to document/comment the variable name rather than just naming the variable properly in be first place.

// Current CGRect to draw into
let ccgrd = self.currentCGRect()

Instead of just

let currentRectForDrawing = self.currentCGRect()

When it is 645am Friday and you spent the whole week with meetings and tasks and sleepless nights.

You just cannot give a tiny rat ass about the naming of routes and functions.

DO NOT ask me about my variable names!

That moment when you take the time to explain the idea of camelCase variable naming as opposed to the Underscores to this hot new girl at the the office and she comes back to you showing off her handy work and you notice how her very first variable is named camelToe

I worked at a startup that indulged in pair programming thing. Where as a junior, you'd be partnered with a senior developer.

My mentor, always insisted on having shortest variable names possible, so that the "size of codebase" will be very small.

It was a nightmare going through his code and understanding what's he's done. Best part, no comments as well.

In a way it has primed me to go through any codebase possible.

Our instructor for game development claims that variable names are not important if your scope is small.

Thoughts?

Here is a picture of his code he gave us as a reference the other day.

When variable naming should be policed... $is_not_checkout. WTF!! Even worse when seen in context.

If (!$is_not_checkout) {
// do something when on the checkout

}

I often mix languages in variable and function naming.

Is it just me or is the first question of the gcse computer science exam the hardest question in the world?

When you see variable name like 'hehe' or 'zzz' a lot, you know the project was ducked up..

Wish the variable naming algorithm in my mind would run in less than O(n⁷⁹) time

What's worse than naming a variable? Naming an application with a .com available.

While writing a big program i always get worried about naming variables.

You know what really cheeses my onions? When people write their code in a foreign language, say French or Spanish, and then come to me asking why it doesn’t work. Like, mate, how you expect me to be able to make sense of your code if your variable naming is totally foreign? And it looks horridly out of place to boot.

Moral of the story: Write your code in English and save us the headache.

Times when selecting variable name is more difficult then logic

So as a student developer with years of background in web development (including both front and backend), c++, java and c#, I was more than surprised when I found out my Informatics assignment hadnt received the proper excellent mark. In fact both me and a friend of mine who has been working with C++ in particular for years got a --mark.

// The assignment was the most simple Windows Forms Application with 2 buttons and a textbox

When we asked about that the teacher said we hadn't labeled the buttons and textboxes, though we had actually taken our time to put labels next to each UI element that would need usage directions.

Though what she meant was renaming the actual variable names, those being textBox1, button1 and button2.

We of course got really mad, because w both follow the accepted naming conventions for each of the languages we write in. Arguing was to no avail. Even telling her that variable naming was not in the assignment instructions was pointless as she said it had been self explanatory​..

The others for whom computers are powered by magic, did their assignments as they had memorized everything that teacher had shown them. Why? Because she didn't teach them how to code in the first place. So they copied what would work.

Fucked up educational​ system, sadly nothing new..

Oh and btw, the naming she uses and teaches students to use is:

button1 - btname
label1- lbname
textBox1 - tbyear

To all the masochists who spent hours debugging misspellings:

1. Learn your tools
2. Learn good practice

Every IDE should point out when you're not using a variable you've initiated or using an uninitiated variable as well as at least highlight, if not simply list, every occurrence of the variable under your cursor and let you find all references or even display the number of references next to a variable at all times, and finally, every IDE should autocomplete for you so when it doesn't you know you've messed up. Good IDE makes all the easy mistakes hard and all of the hard tasks easy. Including running tests. If you don't know how to configure your IDE to do all these things take time and learn it. If you still can't figure it out, replace your IDE maybe...?

Also use the debugger. Preferably one that nicely integrates with your IDE. If you don't, check point 1.

Also write tests and *run them*.

Also if your misspellings tend to consist of a missing `s` at the end of a plural noun just call it `entityCollection` instead of `entities`. And read up on more good programming practices and naming conventions.

I'm always helping out a girl in my class with her coding assignments but her code is absolutely atrocious. I don't have the heart to tell her that her whole method, file and variable naming, and process is wrong and is causing her so many headaches.

Out of everything in this assignment, I just know I'll lose more marks for shitty variable naming than any missing features.
Commenting? Perfectly acceptable. Use of functions and classes? Perfectly acceptable.
Variable names? perfectAcceptableMaybeFileOneButAsAString

I don't get how I'm so shitty at it! I currently have shit like file input, file input as string, file input as vector, I didn't know that would be the hardest part!

When you take over some shitty unindented, fucked up variable naming, using a god damn loop for every fucking thing ass dev's fucking project

Ok this...
like...

come on...

PM: there’s a bug could you investigate and fix this?
Coworker: *investigates*
CW: is this correct? *shows a totally different solution to what he was asked to* *naming a variable “fn”*
Me: but that’s not what you’re asked to do. You know it’s possible to do that right (the supposedly solution)
Cw: but that would have longer code
Me: (what?) 🙃

Wtf do you mean longer code?
Cw: shorter code > spec
Me: 🤦‍♀️
Cw: shorter code > readability
Me: 🤦‍♀️

i'm the only one thinking naming variable can and could be something a little bit subjective? or are everybody else can find the perfect name that make it crystal clear for any person reading it?

Spending too much time on smaller decisions sometimes. Spending 5 minutes thinking about naming a variable and such.

God! I'm so bad in naming variables!

Ok, so currently in my Java course on Udemy we are going more in-depth into scope and visibility, and I'm currently doing the challenge for it.

So I'm doing it and the challenge is to have every single name of a variable or method be called 'x' (just to better understand scope and vis, he mentions how this is not a good practice AT ALL) with the exceptions of the classes and scanner var (but there is an optional challenge to also make them named x).

Now that I progressed into it, I noticed something. This challenge is literally making me make my code so DRY and outside-the-box-thinking that, what if, this could be a practice?

Not the naming everything in your code the same var name, but doing that at the start and then renaming the variables after coding. Because right now, I feel as though I am using SO MUCH less code than if I had the liberty of naming my classes, methods, and variables different things, it's actually kinda cool.

I'll attach my code from the challenge to this after by it really amazed me how well my code looked compared to my previous challenges and even personal projects!

When your teammate is thinking more about his vacations and when he leaves, you find that he calls a variable "cruise" on a project that has nothing related to it

I once had a colleague ranting about my variable naming because it went out of bounds on his IDE's printmargin. To please him i wrote minified code while pair programming

Variable Naming process
-------------------------------------------

Fetching a data of Counties into a variable using Fetch API.

Variable Name: countyData.

The code review is going to be interesting.