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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

I remember one from Java ~20 years ago:

   public final static string HTTP = "http";
   public final static string COLON = ":";
   public final static string SLASH = "/";
   public final static string WWW = "www";

with code like

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

Ignore any Java issues - not used it much in ~15 years.

Edit: I asked the developer who had written this what it was achieving and he said it was best practise ;-)

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Well, actually... it could be a good practice, if the values are used in multiple places.

What's the good practice advantage over just using "http://www"?

If we later change over to use https, it's not like I'd think

  public final static string HTTP = "https";

was any kind of improvement.

Yes, I'm struggling to thing why you'd ever want to construct URLs that way - I'd stick them in configuration with parameters if required.

Edit: Glad someone noticed it was "http" - which is one of the details I do remember correctly.

Autocomplete and composition purposes, i do it mostly with commonly used strings. Less likely to miss-type something.

Some devs are such stuck-ups smh

You could use refactoring tools in your IDE to rename all usages of HTTP to HTTPS.

Which will break other code where someone wrote:

  // Ensure all outgoing URLs are https:
  URL = URL.Replace(HTTP, HTTPS);

Technically it would still work though?

  Replace(HTTPS, HTTPS)

It depends on what you mean by "still work", but in general I'd say "No, it won't work."

If URL starts as "http://www.google.com/", and I expect that will get re-written to an https URL here, the code will compile and run without throwing any errors, but won't accomplish the intent of why that line of code was written and was doing previously. (URL will still contain "http://www.google.com/")

Would be ok if the variables were named like `PROTOCOL`, `SEPARATOR`, `HOST_PREFIX`. The names shown in GP are... well... a shining example of how naming things is hard, at least :)

It buys you nothing, and in the case of WWW, when you're grepping your code base to find everywhere you have "www.oldvendor.com", it fails.

What next? `ZERO = 0`, `ONE = 1`, ...?

Church encoding is mind-bending.

    ZERO  = (f, x) => x
    ONE   = (f, x) => f(x)
    TWO   = (f, x) => f(f(x))
    THREE = (f, x) => f(f(f(x)))
    TRUE  = (a, b) => a
    FALSE = (a, b) => b
    IF    = (p, a, b) => p(a, b)
    NOT   = (p, a, b) => p(b, a)
    AND   = (p, q) => p(q, p)
    OR    = (p, q) => p(p, q)

I had a coworker do this all over a Cold Fusion codebase.

He also claimed he used to be a dentist in Mexico, so anywhere he had his name, email sigs, code comments, etc., he would sign add "DDS" after his name.

Dude was a trip.

Pretty sure I've seen that as well (different codebase though) - that kind of thing happens when you have a code style rules that says "No literals in code, always define constants" and people take it literally.

Wasn't there a post here a month or so ago where someone found something like "three = 5" in the linux kernel?

You know, it wasn't that long ago when booleans in Python were essentially:

    True = 1
    False = 0

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