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Comment by archsurface | Hacker News Reader

Naming gets far worse than that. I've worked on code where the naming was not just unhelpful, it was outright misleading. One of the worst I remember was a project which unsurprisingly was named after a game of thrones character. As I never watched game of thrones it took me about two weeks before I could even remember the stupid name, during which time I was also dumbfounded as to how the program worked until I realised the naming in the code was equally bad, completely misleading. Then there's the place where the stg1 environment was actually the dev0 environment...

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When I was working on a small game startup back 20 years ago, I renamed our all the high-level projects of our codebase into specifically-ancient Greek and then left a "glossary.txt" in the root directory so people could brush up on their language skills... this did not last for very long ;P.

One of the best coding interviews I had was an paired debugging session and the problem boiled down to a poorly named parameter at the beginning.

One of the worst I remember was a project which unsurprisingly was named after a game of thrones character.

I remember the era when sys admins would name machines or environments after nerdy shit like Tatooine, Dagobah. And you had to memorise which was the test environment and which was the mail server.

Thankfully I have never seen that in code.

> I've worked on code where the naming was not just unhelpful, it was outright misleading.

It's one way to achieve job security for life though: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code

> Then there's the place where the stg1 environment was actually the dev0 environment...

Hey, think yourself lucky. It's only a pretty recent occurrence that my team has more than just the two "Prod" and "Non-Prod" environments...

Using the name “prod” for anything other than delivering code to external customers is one of my eternal pet peeves.

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