Comment by laserlight
8 hours ago
> we use the identifier p to represent a value in the people slice — the range block is so small and tight that using a single letter name is clear enough.
No, it's not. When you see `p.Age`, you have to go back and find the body of the loop, see what it operates on and decipher what p stands for. When you see `person.Age`, you understand it. I've never understood what is gained by using `p` instead of spelling it out as `person`.
>you have to go back and find the body of the loop
If the loop is long enough that you don't naturally remember how it was introduced, that's the problem. In the given example, the use of `p.Age` is literally on the next line of code after ` for _, p := range people`.
> I've never understood what is gained by using `p` instead of spelling it out as `person`.
Wisdom I received from, IIRC, the Perl documentation decades ago: tightly-scoped names should be shorter and less attention-grabbing than more broadly-scoped ones, because you should really notice when you're using a global, and you don't want to suffer attention fatigue. (I'm sure the exact wording was quite different.)
Also because it's better for information density. As I recall, Larry Wall also had the idea that more commonly used language keywords should be shorter than rare ones. Good code uses the locals much more often than globals, so you shouldn't need to expend the same amount of effort on them. (The limiting case of this is functional programming idioms where you can eliminate the variable name completely, in cases like (Python examples) `lambda x: int(x)` -> `int`, or `(foo(x) for x in xs)` -> `map(foo, xs)`.
> remember how it was introduced
The problem is that many times I have not read the definition to remember. Debugger puts me into a context where I have to figure out what `p` stands for. I go up the call stack and now there's `s` to be deciphered. Worse is the reuse of `p` for person, product, part, etc. in different contexts.
Debugging is not the only problem. Code is read rarely linearly. Many times I browse different uses of a function, or see how a data structure is modified in different contexts. Looking up single letter variables is just a waste of time.
> Debugger puts me into a context where I have to figure out what `p` stands for.
`p` stands for "the process in question".
I like to think of single-character vars as idea or topic headers that track the single thing I'm currently up to. I'm rarely working with more than one at a time, frequently it's the only variable, and there are contexts where I wouldn't use them at all.
IMHO if you're in a situation where `p` isn't obvious to you, "something has gone wrong".
I've felt strongly for a while now that abbreviations should be "lossless" in order to be useful; it should be unambiguous now get back to the unabbreviated form. For whatever reason, people seem to love trying to optimize for character count with abbreviations that actually make things more confusing (like `res` in a context where it might mean either "response" or "result).
I just don't get the obsession with terseness when we have modern tooling. I don't type particularly fast, but autocomplete makes it pretty quick for me to type out even longer names, and any decent formatter will split up long lines automatically in a way that's usually sane (and in my experience, the times when it's annoying are usually due to something like a function with way too many arguments or people not wanting to put a subexpression in a separate variable because I guess they don't know that the compiler will just inline it) rather than the names being a few characters too many.
Meanwhile, pretty much everywhere I've worked has had at least some concerns about code reviews either already being or potentially becoming a burden on the team due to the amount of time and effort it takes to read through someone else's code. I feel like more emphasis on making code readable rather than just functional and quick to write would be a sensible thing to consider, but somehow it never seems to be part of the discussion.
> and any decent formatter will split up long lines
Any decent editor can wrap long lines on demand. But it's even better not to have to do either of those if not necessary.
> I've felt strongly for a while now that abbreviations should be "lossless" in order to be useful
This is how we got lpszClassName. The world moved away from hungarian notation and even away from defining types for variables in some contexts (auto in cpp, := in Go, var in Java). Often it just adds noise and makes it harder to understand the code at a glance, not easier.
This comes from some dated idea for stuff like C where "its okay to use shorthands for variables" but is it really? The only place I allow it is simple iterators, but now we have enhanced loops where even this is unnecessary. We don't need to save on pixel screen space like if its still the 90s. Even with a simple 1080p monitor you can fit plenty of words and code.
Give your variables, functions, classes meaningful descriptive names that make sense to humans.
Long lines make reading rhythm uncomfortable (long jumps, prolonged eye movements) and long words make the text too dense and slow down the reading. It’s bad typography.
I have heard an idea that a good variable should be understood by just reading its name, out of context. That would make “ProductIndex” superior to “i”, which doesn't add any clarity.
A good variable name is the one that is understood by reading it in context, which is why you don't have names like "current_person" or "CurrentIndexOfProductBeingUpdated".
I would argue that ambiguity and uncertainty slow down reading, and more importantly comprehension, far more than a few additional characters.
It depends on whom you are optimizing for. Someone who knows the language, but not this system/codebase, or someone who works in this area often?
Something like "AnIteratorObjectWithPersonPointer" would be a long word, "person" is absolutely not. If a 6 letter identifier causes you that much trouble with code being too verbose, then it's likely a screen resolution/density/font issue, not a naming issue.
> That would make “ProductIndex” superior to “i”, which doesn't add any clarity.
And then you introduce extra two levels of nested loops and suddenly "i", "j", and "k" don't make any sense on their own, but "ProductIndex", "BatchIndex" and "SeriesIndex" do.
And then you introduce extra two levels of nested loops and suddenly "i", "j", and "k" don't make any sense on their own, but "ProductIndex", "BatchIndex" and "SeriesIndex" do.
ijk for indices in loops are actually clearer than random names in nested loops precisely because it is a *very common convention* and because they occur in a defined order. So you always know that "j" is the second nesting level, for instance. Which relates to the visual layout of the code.
You may not have known of this convention or you are unable to apply "the principle of least astonishment". A set of random names for indices is less useful because it communicates less and takes longer to comprehend.
Just like most humans do not read text one letter at a time, many programmers also do not read code as prose. They scan it rapidly looking at shapes and familiar structures. "ProductIndex", "BatchIndex" and "SeriesIndex" do not lend themselves to scanning, so you force people who need to understand the code to slow down to the speed of someone who reads code like they'd read prose. That is a bit amateurish.
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I think this may be related to how people read code. You have people who scan shapes, and then you have people who read code almost like prose.
I scan shapes. For me, working with people who read code is painful because their code tends to to have less clear "shapes" (more noise) and reads like more like a verbal description.
For instance, one thing I've noticed is the preference for "else if" rather than switch structures. Because they reason in terms of words. And convoluted logic that almost makes sense when you read it out loud, but not when you glance at it.
This is also where I tend to see unnecessarily verbose code like
func isZero(a int) bool { if a == 0 { return true } else { retur false } }
strictly speaking not wrong, but many times slower to absorb. (I think most developers screech to a halt and their brain goes "is there something funny going on in the logic here that would necessitate this?")
I deliberately chose to learn "scanning shapes" as the main way to orient myself because my first mentor showed me how you could navigate code much faster that way. (I'd see him rapidly skip around in source files and got curious how he would read that fast. Turns out he didn't. He just knew what shape the code he was looking for would be).
I think this is pretty insightful, and I might add this as another reason LLM code looks so revolting. It's basically writing prose in a different language, which make sense - it's a _language_ model, it has no structural comprehension to speak of.
Whereas I write code (and expect good code to be written) such that most information is represented structurally: in types, truth tables, shape of interfaces and control flow, etc.
> I think this may be related to how people read code. You have people who scan shapes, and then you have people who read code almost like prose.
I think this is an astute observation.
I think there is another category of "reading" that happens, is what you're reading for "interaction" or "isolation".
Sure c.method is a scalable shape but if your system deals with Cats, Camels, Cars, and Crabs that same c.method when dealing with an abstract api call divorced from the underlying representation might not be as helpful.
I would think that we would have more and better research on this, but the only paper I could find was this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.00785 its a meta analysis of 57 other papers, a decent primer but nothing ground breaking here.
> I scan shapes. ... verbal description.
I would be curious if you frequently use a debugger? Because I tend to find the latter style much more useful (descriptive) in that context.
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> That would make “ProductIndex” superior to “i”, which doesn't add any clarity.
Adds a ton of clarity, especially if you have a nested loop.
and god help you if those loops are pairing People and Products.
though now that I write that out... it would be really nice if you could optionally type iteration vars so they couldn't be used on other collections / as plain integers. I haven't seen any languages that do that though, aside from it being difficult to do by accident in proof-oriented languages.
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But what if your codebase has to interact with leads, customers, and another 3rd party system called Metrica with leads, customers?
When you write a loop, do you now name the variable
OurPerson.Age MetricaPerson.Age
?
What if, 3 years from now, you include another 3rd party vendor into the system and have to write code against that data and in the data they name their stuff OurPerson.Age?
Not saying you are wrong at all. Just naming things is hard and context dependent. I think that is why it is endlessly argued.
I think this is clearly a matter of preference. Shorter variable (or rather, appropriately short variables for the context) for me are easier to recognize and disambiguate. They take up fewer tokens, so to speak. When I see `p.Age` I don't have to go back and look at the beginning of the loop because I just read that line and I remember it.
If your loops are so long you can't fit them on one screenfull you have much more fundamental issues.
person.Age is easier to understand than p.Age regardless of the loop size.
You arent wrong, but it is not an absolute.
Furniture maker, house framer, finish carpenter are all under the category of woodworking, but these jobs are not the same. Years of honed skill in tool use makes working in the other categories possible, but quality and productivity will suffer.
Does working in JS, on the front end teach you how to code, it sure does. So does working in an embedded system. But these jobs might be further apart than any of the ones I highlighted in the previous category.
There are plenty of combinations of systems and languages where your rule about a screen just isn't going to apply. There are plenty of problems that make scenarios where "ugly loops" are a reality.
I didn't say it was an absolute. But once a scope grows to the point where you have to navigate to absorb a function or a loop, both readability and complexity tends to worsen. As does your mental processing time. Especially for people who "scan" code rapidly rather than reading it.
The slower "readers" will probably not mind as much.
This is why things like function size is usually part of coding standards at a company or on a project. (Look at Google, Linux etc)
This is something that it seems some Go people just don't "believe" in my experience, that for some people that letter in that context is not mentally populated immediately.
It's honestly a shame because it seems like Go is a good language but with such extremely opinionated style that is so unpleasant (not just single letters but other things stuff about tests aren't supposed to ever have helpers or test frameworks) feels aggressively bad enough to basically ruin the language for me.
I think the community is split on such things. I ended up telling the side that gets persnickety about short names and only using if statements in tests to pound sand. I use things that make my life easier. I now care less about some rude rando on r/golang than I did five years ago.
I agree with this comment so much.
Tried to use the new slices package or comparables? It's a nightmare to debug, for no reason whatsoever. If they would've used interface names like Slice or Comparable or Stringable or something, it would have been so much easier.
The naming conventions are something that really fucks up my coding workflow, and it can be avoided 100% of the time if they would stop with those stupid variable names. I am not a machine, and there is no reason to make code intentionally unreadable.