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Is it really tempting for people? They've given me too many headaches when I've had to reformat or add functionality to files.
Unless it's a simple single use script that fit on the computer screen, I don't feel like global variables would ever be tempting, unless it's for constants.
Most people suck at software engineering.
Plus, there's always the temptation to do it the shitty way and "fix it later" (which never happens).
You pay your technical debt. One way or another.
It's way worse than any gangster.
Not if you leave the project soon enough. It's like tech debt chicken.
Then, at your new job, you see garbage code and wonder what dumbass would put global variables everywhere
amen
Plus, there's always the temptation to do it the shitty way and "fix it later"
double amen
// TODO: Fix later
In a 10 year old commit from someone who's left the company 5 years ago.
Bruh. I fixed software from the 90's.
Scientific software too. Which is way weirder.
😀
Rarely have I ever actually had consequences for my sins, which tends to be why I don't go back and fix them....
If tech debt weight is felt in any way, it tends to get fixed. If it's not felt, it's just incredibly easy to forget and disregard.
(This is mostly me not learning my lesson well enough from my time being on Tech Debt: The Team. I do try and figure out the correct way to do things, but at the end of the day, I get paid to do what the boss wants as cheaply as possible, not what's right :/ money dgaf about best practices until someone gets sued for malpractice, but on that logic, maybe the tech debt piper just hasn't returned for payment from me yet... Only time will tell)
For me most of the people who have written our most annoying tech debt left the company long time ago.
This community makes more sense when you realize the majority of users are CS students.
Pointers hard!! LOL
Hey, don't you group me in with people who have had a small amount of real training!
They've given me too many headaches...
I.e. you did use them, but learned the hard way why you shouldn't.
Very likely OP is a student, or entry-level programmer, and is avoiding them because they were told to, and just haven't done enough refactoring & debugging or worked on large enough code bases to 'get' it yet.
Is it really tempting for people? They've given me too many headaches when I've had to reformat or add functionality to files.
I don’t get it either. Why would you ever feel the need for them to begin with?
Just create a global object and stuff your variable in there. Now you have a global singleton and that's not a purely bad practice :D
Just call it "state management" and nobody will even care.
Not necessarily a bad practice if the singleton is immutable, and it’s provided via dependency injection for example.
As a hobby coder: "mmmhm, mmmm, mmhm... I know some of these words!"
Software dev is full of obscure keywords that describe otherwise pretty simple or basic concepts you stumble upon in practice naturally and that you probably already understand.
Here's one more of my favourite examples of such a keyword: memoization
Ahh yes memoization, the complicated way to say "remember this, I might need it again"
Important to contain all your mess to one side of the room, makes it easier to manage
So you saying, just the tip?
Real enterprise programmers know that everything should be on the stack... so they declare a List《void*》 in main.
But we might need to add more features in the future so it might not just be a list in a few years. Better encapsulate it in a few layers of abstractions just to be safe.
Obligatory, mutable global variables are evil.
The definition of a variable is that it’s mutable. If it’s immutable it’s constant.
There's no ISO standardized definition for variable. People use that word with all kinds of meaning.
Waaaait a minute... isn't it called a variable because the contents are, you know, variable?
This is needlessly obtuse. The definition of the word is that it's non-constant. There isn't an ISO definition of the word no, but there are many reputable dictionaries out there that will serve as an alternative.
Singletons:
Me: O_O;
You can do better, define intergalactic variables that share the same memory location across multiple programs so you can seamlessly pass variables from one to the next.
Is it an orgy if multiple global variables are used in a multi threaded code?
I've once had a course involving programming and the lecturer rewrote the code, which we were usually using at our institute, making ALL variables global. - Yes, also each and every loop counter and iterator. 🤪
There’s no way you teach a uni course and do this kind of thing unless to demonstrate poor practice/run time difference. Are you sure you were paying attention?
Yes. He really thought it was efficient and would avoid errors if literally all variables were defined in a single Matlab function he called at the beginning of the script. We students all thought: "Man, are you serious?" As we didn't want to debug such a mess, in our code, we ignored what he was doing and kept using local variables.
Ah I misread I thought it was specifically a programming course. I can expect this from a math prof.
Yes, it was a course on finite deformation material models. And no, you do really, really not want to declare each and every variable in your material subroutine globally for the whole finite element program.
Lecturers at universities tend to have little to no industry experience at all.
"But what if I put the whole program into a class and then made it a class wide variable?"
Sounds like the piece of legacy software I have do deal with.
I am not a programmer who knows how to program. I know this because global variables are how I fix most the issue I run into, but are constantly told this wrong.
I asked stable diffusion for a photo-realistic version of this image. This isn't what I had in mind
Me putting everything in 'public:'
Exhibitionist Devs be like.