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Comment by AgentOrange1234 | Hacker News Reader

In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.

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In Japan they have the abbreviation “NG” (“not good”) that’s often used as the opposite of “OK”. I always liked how, when I worked for a Japanese machine learning company, classifiers would be between “OK” and “NG”. Maybe semantically “okay” and “not good” are not great opposites, but I always liked how having textual alignment makes the contrast immediately obvious

Log levels have me screaming internally

https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.4.0/libdoc/logger/rdoc/Logger....

It's not unusual in France to use OK and KO. I never liked it much because it's too easy to confuse and no semantically a good opposite either, but visually it does look very balanced.

Is it because KO and chaos are both pronounced /ka.o/?

I've always just understood it as in knockout, chaos wouldn't fit in the way OK and KO are used (as predicate adjectives, if I understand English grammar classes correctly) but it is part of why some people like to use "KO", I'm not sure.

What does KO stand for?

Korrect Oll

And that is french and means the opposite of OK?

What does OK stand for?

  The origin of OK is disputed; however, most modern reference works hold that 
  it originated around Boston as part of a fad in the late 1830s of 
  abbreviating misspellings – that it is an initialism of "oll korrect" as a 
  misspelling of "all correct". This origin was first described by linguist 
  Allen Walker Read in the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK

I've seen it a lot in Spain as well. I guess it's a combination of just being the reverse of OK, and also "KO" meaning "knocked out" just feels like the opposite of OK.

“SUCCÈS” and “ERREUR” work too.

Seems like “not okay” would be the cleanest antonym. I can’t see anything that could go wrong with using it.

> Meeting at 4 pm today?

> NO

Norway (Yes this is a YAML pun)

Is this not common outside of Japan? I've often seen this used here in Canada.

Sometimes as NFG after a particularly bad day.

Ah, but I use a normal proportional font in my editor so same and diff have different widths.

That was the fun comment. The serious ones:

1. I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience.

2. Nobody ever complained that my source code is

  a = 1
  ab = 2
  abc = 3

instead of

  a   = 1
  ab  = 2
  abc = 3

3. No tables or diagrams in comments of course but I think that I could configure my editor (emacs) to use a monospaced font there. I do use a monospaced font for the ``` ``` blocks of md files.

4. I'm using Atkinson Hyperlegible Next https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

2. You must have never written Haskell.

Or terraform.

They would complain if it's:

  a   = 1
  ab = 2
  abc = 3

> I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience.

I'm the opposite, I prefer non-proportional fonts even for prose.

Code editors should do this visually without adding actual space characters to the file.

why not go even further?

store the source minified without any extraneous whitespace and let the editor display a properly indented view in your preferred style...

An AST-based code editor. That would be neat.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one - I loved using proportional fonts. I find my ability to scan words is much faster than with monospaced, and I navigate semantically and prefer automated refactors so that I never really felt the need for multi-cursor editing or aligned blocks.

All that came to an end when I worked on a project using F#. It just doesn't work with meaningful whitespace. In the current world, with the prevalence of python, I can't really go back unfortunately. Maybe indenting with tabs is the way after all...

I am using my proportional font in Python too. The meaningful spaces are at the beginning of the line. 4 monospaced spaces become 4 narrower spaces, 8 monospaced spaces become 8 narrower spaces and they are still twice as wide as the 4 spaces.

I never had problems with Ruby, Python, JS, Elixir, Perl and probably other languages I used a little in the last 15 years or more. HTML and CSS too.

The best of both worlds would be achieved by elastic tabstops. https://nick-gravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

If only they took off.

> It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length.

You're just matching them wrong. On/off and yes/no may look unequal, but what about yes/off or on/no?

This reminds me of all the (fun) times I had coming across “enable toggle” and “disabler enabler”.

Bonus points for taking “YES” (looking at you FreeBSD) or “1” or “ON”.

true/lies

Row/col works but width/height doesn't, alas.

I sometimes use abbreviations like wd/ht. Should be understood with surrounding context.

I hope! And I abbreviate w w w.

But w/h does.

I use wide/tall for that. It reads alright: “row 5, col 4; 15 wide, 8 tall”.

You caught my OCD. I like to use upper / lower a lot.

Consistency of abbreviation style is important, too. It drives me crazy that the Google Maps API uses lat/lng rather than lat/lon.

I wonder if that was part of the reason that some programming languages use constructs like "if / fi" "do / od" etc.

(Note: After writing the above, I checked with ChatGPT, it claims that the main motivation was to make it unambiguous which which "opening word" a "closing word" belonged to.)

This tracks with an old convention in languages like Pascal, which uses begin / end keywords for all blocks, where people would add "end (* if *)" as a comment to make it more explicit which block is being closed.

There's only two things I hate in this world: people who do column alignment for vars and function params, and the Dutch.

Doesn’t work that well without the context.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/379482-there-s-only-two-thi...

Someone who is unfamiliar with the quote will just be confused.

Also have/want if old/new is already taken.

up/dn is cute

> old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong

also some abbreviations work fine:

    min
    max

    row
    col

    beg (vs start)
    end

    key
    val

    src
    dst

    pos
    len

and we have

    public_key
    secret_key (vs private)

    from
    till

    push
    pull

    load
    save

    init
    done

    inner
    outer

-----

and if you speak Norwegian you have two options:

    ja    yes
    no    nei

but that may trigger a different kind of OCD :-)

Here’s a larger stash: https://github.com/timvieira/justified-variables (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31138306).

Forgot the ever succinct

  get
  put

There's also aye/nay but I don't think I've ever seen those in code

Muckle thanks tae ye, ah'm stealing thae richt noo

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