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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

I love the variable names. I definitely had the same naming conventions as a kid :)

Funny story. Sophomore year at college, I worked at a dev shop, and I was the first person to set up version control there (CVS... it was like year 2000.) The next day I reviewed changes that were merged and variables $tit and $ass were all over the place.

I assumed the guy who checked it in was just immature and met w him to "professionalize" him. But turns out these variables referred to Titles and Assignments (it was staffing software). LOL!

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As a kid? When writing stupid scripts, I frequently use `fart` as a variable name to this day.

I'm a staunch supporter of naming variables intentionally in software that lives, but I'm definitely not above doing a `fart=True; while fart: ...` in temporary repl work.

Maybe I'm just eternally 10 years old, haha.

I must be old-fashioned! My variable names in throwaway programs tend to be x, y, and z and my iteration variables tend to be i, j, and k.

Huh. I tend to use the first letter of the type, so "s" for a string, "d" for a dictionary, etc. Then "s2," "d2," etc. if there are more than one.

When I learned programming the BASIC variant I used only supported two-character variable names. And even where longer names were allowed, the text of the program consumed memory so you could optimize by keeping variable names as short as possible. So I had the habit of using single-letter variables for quite a while. I still use them as loop counters, or in small functions where the scope of the variable is maybe a few lines of code and completely unambiguous. In such cases I think long variable names are distracting.

My foo is "yo" and my bar is "ho"

Mine are just whatever happens to be under the keyboard layout I'm using at the time. If qwerty, then `asdf`, `qwer`, `uiop`, `zxcv` are likely to be temp variable names. But since I've dabbled in other layouts, I've found the names have changed to:

- Dvorak: aoeu, htns, gcrl, mwvz

- Colemak: arst, neio, qwfp

- Mtgap: inea, htsr, dlcw, fvgj

etc...

Same (did you start learning programming with C?). i++ is pretty much hardcoded into my brain.

Everyone doesn't use i,j,k for counting variables?

Yes. At least all decent people.

Mine are: x, xx, xxx, xxxx...

I actually try to not do that now. As they say, programming is the art of naming and I think forcing myself to think about what a variable is (and then using that name) leads to better outcomes.

Agree for throwaway work it may not matter but I try to keep myself disciplined anyway. A good example is say I am doing an advent of code and the temptation is to treat it as throw away code. But the reality is, sometimes I put it down and come back to it, and having variables like fart doesn't really help snap back into the context.

Not saying this is an absolute but I find it a general rule of thumb for myself

Are you serious?! That is so hilarious to me, because I do the same thing! And I am always so terrified that I will get an interview, and they will want to see a sample of my code, and I will have forgotten to take out all the bits of juvenile humor that are scattered through the code of my personal projects!

Nice. I vividly remember the days, sometimes in the 80s, in some university cellar, hacking away at our green-lit vt terminals connected to some vaxens, that one of the other regulars in the room and I used temp variables _hudli_ and _tralla_ as some kind of ritual.

Ah, "hudli hudli" stands for "Extraordinarily fast guitar playing" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hudli - it's only now that I look this up

heck, in MY time, variables could only have 2 (significant) letters, so we were stuck with "hi", "jk", "ah" and things like our initials....

The good thing is that since only 2 letters were significant, the variables "fa", "fart", "fan", "fall" etc. were all treated the same, which could cause some confusion to people not familiar with the intricacies of C64 BASIC ;-)

In college, usually a few minutes before an assignment was due, I'd frantically Ctrl+F the project for various curse words.

Heck, when I write throwaway scripts most of my variables are different slang terms for feces. Sure, I use foo, bar, baz, bing sometimes too. But I never grew up either. At some point I decided that was a Good Thing, and I have no further plans to mature.

As a kid my dad told me that I could name my variables whatever I wanted. I still remember the confusion on his face when he saw “int iPod” and “string xbox” all over my code.

"I got fired over a variable name...." - https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/dpcfns/i...

The linked "dog story" is an.. eye opener, too:

https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/95dgrx/i...

Surprisingly I did get pulled into a meeting with the CEO and a sales/custcare guy because of a similar issue.

I wrote functions that are available for the users to use (they can customize their own dashboard). Our function conventions are camelCase. The function I wrote was something along the lines of `cumOnMetric` or something like that.

Needless to say some square somewhere thought this was a joke and didn't like it. So there I was, just blinking away and wasn't even aware this was something sensitive. It was funny sure, but I didn't have the idea that it was "unprofessional". I still feel the idea of professionalism is quite a club thing.

But yeah we got our first snake_case function name because of that.

I don't see how the casing matters here? Would `cum_on_metric` somehow be better?

lol nice find

In a class where we were writing a parser for math expressions, this was my plausible deniability scenario when I named the functions whose job was to analyze characters. Looking back, I'm sure the teachers were not at all amused.

I can't imagine anyone accidentally naming their variables $tit and $ass and not realizing it. I expect the guy thought it was funny, and the domain gave him some plausible deniability.

I lied! It wasn't CVS... It was Visual Source Safe!

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