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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

I use long variable names all the time and it's never actually made the code harder to follow. You generally parse a whole word as a shape rather than one letter at a time anyway once you know the word, so effectively the only difference is a bit more horizontal space. If someone grew up using whole words as variables in math I doubt they'd find single characters easier to work with.

For programming, using characters not available on a standard QWERTY keyboard is bad international code shareability.

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I'll just say this definitely doesn't agree with my experience, though it's certainly the kind of thing that might differ from person to person, brain to brain.

Here's one thought experiment: imagine variables get longer and longer and longer. Clearly, at some point, they become so long that they're much more unwieldy to work with. Now it's just a question of, as they get shorter, when do the gains start to become insignificant?

(Re QWERTY: Ease of input is certainly a consideration, but hardly an insurmountable problem. We should not forever restrict ourselves to basic latin because that's what happens to be printed on many physical keyboards at this moment.)

In the kinds of jobs I've gotten, I spend more time reading code than writing code. As such long variable names are very helpful as I have less information I need to commit into my mental working memory.

It's definitely a trade-off, that's why the idea of ideographic variables is so interesting.

Even when reading code you wrote yourself, long variable names can be immensely helpful.

I was working on some code today which I wrote a couple of months ago and came across some fields in a struct I had made, two of the fields were named like something_d_foo and something_d_bar (with something, foo and bar being strings which I've replaced in this comment). These names describe a relationship of something to foo and bar. When I read the name I had given it, I thought these were the somethings DISCONNECTED from their foos and bars but a comment I had written beside each of them informed me that they were the DEFAULT somethings of the foos and bars. I promptly renamed the fields as something_default_foo and something_default_bar.

I doubt anyone can really parse grails.plugin.searchable.internal.compass.mapping.SearchableGrailsDomainClassCompassClassMapperFactory [1] as a shape.

[1] https://github.com/gpc/searchable/blob/master/src/java/grail...

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It does say a lot about what it is

This is obviously code that solves a very real problem.

I think long names are relative. Jokes like these[1] don't come from a vacuum. I've seen serious code with sentence-long variable names before, and it does make it hard for me to read at a glance.

[1] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

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