Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

Waterluvian·

Is this just one of those exceptional cases when having a strict variable naming convention doesn't work out?

View on HN

Seems to be working fine.

What else would you name it?

CNBiaoJie

Still easier to understand than this monstrosity, even for those who don’t speak Chinese (assuming they can google the documentation).

I have no idea what "BiaoJie" is (well, in context, I assume it's a romanization of the pronunciation of 表姐), so that name would be completely unhelpful. Whereas the current name describes the relationship such that I can understand it, even if I don't know why this particular relationship is deserving of a name.

Something like CNBiaoJie also assumes that Chinese is the only language that names this relationship, and I don't know if that's true.

I have no idea what ElderCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter is, and understanding and remembering "BiaoJie" would be much easier for me than re-parsing that every time. As I pointed out in another comment, there's a reason we give short names to complicated concepts instead of spelling them out every time. "while" is a lot easier to understand once its meaning has been explained to you than "EveryTimeWeGetHereCheckIfThisConditionIsTrueAndExecuteThisCodeBlockAndJumpBackHereIfSo".

> Something like CNBiaoJie also assumes that Chinese is the only language that names this relationship, and I don't know if that's true.

No it doesn't, not any more than having an identifier called "Sister" assumes that English is the only language with the concept of sisters.

BiaoJie is literally the transliteration of Chinese. So yes, naming it BiaoJie is saying this is explicitly Chinese.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com