this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Ya'll think you have real unsolved problems. I'm here with "naming variables" (โโ _โ ).
As a software engineering researcher, I strongly agree. SE research has studied code comprehension for more than 40 years, but for that amount of time, we know surprisingly little about what makes really high-quality code. We are decent in saying what makes very bad code, though, but beyond extreme cases, it's hard to come to fairly general statements.
Genuinely curious - what do we know makes code very bad?
A few bad things in code for which we have fairly consistent evidence:
we become programmers because we lack creativity. my brain short circuits when i have to come up with something other than "foo", "bar", or maybe even "baz"
Programming is quite literally creative problem solving, so I doubt that programmers lack creativity.
Problem solving, of course, but creative writing, composition, and art... not my cup of tea.
I have the opposite problem, my variables are sometimes too descriptive. I even annoy myself at times with VariableThatDoesThisOneThing and VariableThatDoesDifferentThing just because I want to be able to come back later and not wonder what I was smoking.