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Comment by ape4 | Hacker News Reader

In a real application meaningful names are nearly always possible, eg:

    const pi = 3.1415926
    const 2pi = 2 * pi
    const circumference = 2pi * radius

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Calling tau 2pi is the most cursed thing I've seen all day. Appropriate for Halloween.

If you call a variable tau in production code then you're being overly cute. I know what it means, because I watch math YouTube for fun, but $future_maintainer in all likelihood won't.

Where do you draw the line then? Stopping at `tau` just because `$future_maintainer` might get confused feels like an arbitrary limit to me.

What about something like `gamma`? Lorentz factor? Luminance multiplier? Factorial generalization?

Why not just use the full sentence rather than assign it to an arbitrary name/symbol `gamma` and leave it dependent on the context?

And it's not that hard to add an inline comment to dispel the confusion

  const tau = 2*pi; // Alternate name for 2pi is "tau"

Agree in real life you can come up with meaningful names (and should when the names are used far away from the point of assignment), but it doesn’t make sense for GPs example, where the whole point was to talk about assignments in the abstract.

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