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Comment by recursivecaveat

16 hours ago

Do people really argue about variable names? Most reviews comments I see are fairly trivial, but almost always not very subjective. (Leftover debug log, please add comment here, etc) Maybe it helps that many of our seniors are from a team where we had no auto-formatter or style guide at all for quite a while. I think everyone should experience that a random mix of `){` and `) {` does not really impact you in any way beyond the mild irking of a crooked painting or something. There's a difference between aesthetically bothersome and actually harmful. Not to say that you shouldn't run a formatter, but just for some perspective.

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recursivecaveat

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jffhn  15 hours ago

>Do people really argue about variable names?

Of course they do. A program's code is mostly a graph of names; they can be cornerstones of its clarity, or sources of confusion and bugs.

The first thing I do when debugging is ensuring proper names, sometimes that's enough to make the bug obvious.

  • vaylian  13 hours ago

    The greatest barrier to understanding is not lack of knowledge but incorrect knowledge. That's why good names matter. And naming things is hard, which is why it makes sense to comment on variable names in a review.

    • whynotmaybe  10 hours ago

      Unless the naming convention were written in the 90s and all variable must follow a precise algorithm to be made of only abbreviation and a maximum length of 15.

      Or for some, if it contains the value of a column in the db, it must have the same name as the column.

      So yeah, instead of "UsualQuantityOrder", you get "UslQtyOrd" or "I_U_Q_O"... And you must maintain the comments to explain what the field is supposed to contain.

alemanek  7 hours ago

I have seen this mostly on teams which refuse to formalize preferences into a style guide.

I have fixed this by forcing the issue and we get together as a team, set a standard and document it. If we can use tools to enforce it automatically we do that. If not you get a comment with a link to the style guide and told to fix it.

Style is subjective but consistency is not. Having a formal style guide which is automatically enforced helps with onboarding and code review as well.