this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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had a co-worker once who called the variable holding the first record in a complicated workflow "rec1st" and the last record "reclst", unaware that in every font used by every code editor except his, a lowercase l and number 1 look identical.
i spent a day debugging that after he quit.
Lesson for the future: stop using crappy illegible fonts in a code editor, and use something nice like Fira Code or even Fira Mono or Sans if you don't like ligatures.
Edit: In the middle of writing this I realized it was a confusion between "1" and "l", which makes the font choice even more bizarre. What kinda garbage font doesn't distinguish between the two? I could understand if it was capital "i" and lowercase "l" since they look extremely similar in most sans serif fonts, but "1" and "l"?
Also it takes like 10 seconds to change the name of a variable across the whole file with a modern code editor like VSCode or an IDE for the specific language you were working with. If they were confusing you, you could have just changed "reclst" into "last_record" and that would save you a day of work.
Maybe he wasn’t really unaware that only his font choice differentiated the names.
No good code font would make
1andllook identical. Character differentiability is like the most important thing.Look, JetBrains did it right.