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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

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arethuza

But don't do what one memorably awful project I had to maintain did - to use that example they would have done:

country_code==FIFTY_FIVE and day_of_week==ONE

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But what if the definition of 55 changes? You'll be glad to have your table of constants then.

The project also defined HTTP, COLON, SLASH, WWW and DOT so that you would have:

   string url = HTTP + COLON + SLASH + SLASH + WWW + DOT ...

I swear I'm not making this up....

Reminds me of http://pk.org/rutgers/notes/pikestyle.html

> "There is a famously bad comment style: ...

Don't laugh now, wait until you see it in real life."

Well at least a typo sould give a compile time error for some subset of typos.

But in the trade-off in code readability was probably the cause of many other mistakes, so probably ended up further behind.

Sounds like a PHP codebase I'm currently working in. I shit you not, $LI = '<li>' is in the functions file, along with $LI_END.

It was a very enterprisey Java codebase from the bad old days of J2EE - it had somewhere over 30 layers of abstractions between the code in a JSP and a web service call.

[NB 30 isn't an exaggeration - I think the vast team who wrote it were paid by the abstraction or something].

But how else will your compiler tell you that you mistyped 55? /s

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