Why are they even named like this?
When I read code, I want to be able to read it…
Is this from a time when space was expensive and you wanted to reduce the space of the source files on the devs PC???
For me (with a native language != english), this made it a lot harder to get into programming in the first place.
I recently held a science slam about this topic! It’s a mix of the first computer scientists being mathematicians, who love their abbreviations, and limited screen size, memory and file size. It’s a trend in computing that has been well justified in the past, but has been making it harder for people to work together. And the need to use abbreviations has completely gone with the age of auto completion and language servers.
mathematicians, who love their abbreviations
Man, I hate that so much. I swear this was half the reason I struggled with maths and physics, that these guys need to write this:
Rather than this:
At some point, they even collectively decided that not having to write a multiplication dot is more important than being able to use more than a single letter for your variables. Just what the fuck?
Thing is, you usually define all your variables. At least we do in engineering (of physical variety, rather than software).
Mostly because we can’t expect everyone reading the calculation to know, and that not everyone uses the same symbols.
Not explaining each variable is bad practice, other than for very simple things. (I do expect everyone and their dog reading a process eng calc to know PV=nRT, at a minimum).
Just like (in my opinion) not defining industry specific abbreviations is also bad practice.
Mathematicians don’t do this? Shame on them.
I mean, it was rather physics that was worse in this regard.
Mathematicians do define their variable quite rigorously. Everything is so abstract, at some point you do just need to write down “this thing is a number”. Problem with maths folks is rather that they get more creative with their other symbols. So, “this thing is a number” is actually written as “∃x, x ∈ ℝ”.
But yeah, in the school/university physics I experienced, it was assumed that you knew that U is voltage, ρ (rho) is density, ω (omega) is angular velocity etc…
At one point, I had to memorize six pages of formulas and it felt like every letter (Latin, Greek, uppercase, lowercase, some Fraktur for good measure) was a shorthand for something.
The bottom is absolutely not more readable, and it’s much more difficult to work with.
It’s been really holding me back in learning coding. I felt pretty comfortable at first learning javascript, but as I got further the code was increasingly hard to look back to and understand, to the point I had to spend a lot of time understanding my own code.
Does it truely matter after the code has been compiled if it has more full words or not?
It matters as soon as a requirement change comes in and you have to change something. Writing a dirty ass incomprehensible, but working piece of code is ok, as long as no one touches it again.
But as soon as code has to be reworked, worked on together by multiple people, or you just want to understand what you did 2 weeks earlier, code readability becomes important.
I like Uncle Bobs Clean Code (with a grain of salt) for a general idea of what such an approach to make code readable could look like. However, it is controversial and if overdone, can achieve the opposite. I like it as a starting point though.
I can’t remember it, but I read one Microsoft blog post (in Vista era?) about how one team at Microsoft would develop some amazing new Windows component. They’d proudly name it AmazingNewService.dll. And then the operating system team would come in and say “that’s all fine and good, but you have to conform to the naming convention.” 8+3 filenames. First two letters probably “MS”, because of reasons. …and 15 years later, people still regularly go “What the fuck is MSAMNSVC.DLL?”
Why are they still so hung up on 8.3 long after Win95?
I get not wanting to have spaces in a filename. Those suck.
Is there something low-level that still doesn’t like long filenames?
Well this was Vista era, they were probably doing that to ensure some sort of expectation from particularly tricky legacy apps. Windows prefers not to break old apps if at all possible.
Rhowch, cwtch, mwyn have to be Welsh. Classicly Welsh sounding words, and mbrsrtowcs, strxfrm can’t possibly be Welsh. Source: my welsh uncle taught me to pronounce Welsh place names.
Wcstold, wcsoll wmffre could be either but sound really weird as Welsh to me.
Wmffre is actually the Welsh spelling of the name “Humphrey”
I love the Welsh, but holy shit that’s not what those letters are supposed to be for. They and the Irish just made a bunch of shit up when they started to standardize spelling. It makes me understand how Russians feel when Westerners use Cyrillic letters improperly.
One last joke played on the colonizers invading them
