Old time horror
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In Pisa University (The most important Computer Science faculty in Italy) we still use to name variables of examples and simple code snippets "Pippo" from the Italian name of "Goofy", the Disney's Character... :-D This is a really old habit since my CS teacher at the high school used to do so when she was studying at the university :laugh: But the best part is that when I do code review or debug on old code I usually found that programmers that comes from Pisa's University uses this habit in their professional life :laugh:
Bye By(t)e ;-)
modified on Thursday, September 16, 2010 12:15 PM
Then this has long since become a tradition and cannot be a horror :)
A while ago he asked me what he should have printed on my business cards. I said 'Wizard'. I read books which nobody else understand. Then I do something which nobody understands. After that the computer does something which nobody understands. When asked, I say things about the results which nobody understand. But everybody expects miracles from me on a regular basis. Looks to me like the classical definition of a wizard.
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I'm not sure what's worse - baseball player names or Hungarian Nutation. Now where did I put that decoder ring?
Hmm, hungarian notation is probably as popular as RPN. I should start my old FORTH and code something, using hungarian notation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation[^]
A while ago he asked me what he should have printed on my business cards. I said 'Wizard'. I read books which nobody else understand. Then I do something which nobody understands. After that the computer does something which nobody understands. When asked, I say things about the results which nobody understand. But everybody expects miracles from me on a regular basis. Looks to me like the classical definition of a wizard.
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I'm not sure what's worse - baseball player names or Hungarian Nutation. Now where did I put that decoder ring?
tom1443 wrote:
Hungarian Nutation
_Nut_ation is indeed a fitting term for that. Did you intentionally misspell this or was it just a Freudian error? :-D
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Hi, I'm merely passing this on following a conversation I had with my dad the other night but thought it deserved a mention. I've no reason to doubt him on this one. I think. A bit of background - my dad started work in computers back in the '70s (and did indeed use punch cards and such like). Eventually, they had a simple editor, higher-level languages were being used and programs were getting more complex and at some point, contractors from the States were over writing some applications for them. He claims he still shudders at the memory of looking at their code after they'd gone and discovering that they'd left a small chunk of their homeland behind - the majority of variable and function names were named after baseball players... Kev
I fondly remember a time at university when I coded some neural network stuff together with two friends. We frequently came up with all kind of silly variable names taken from Asterix comics, out of the midst of some of the more witty parts of our conversations, and the like. On one occasion we were looking at a boolean variable that we realized we forgot to initialize, causing an error. We discussed whether we should initialize it to true or false, so I sat down and wrote:
bool isgood = true || false;
:-D
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tom1443 wrote:
Hungarian Nutation
_Nut_ation is indeed a fitting term for that. Did you intentionally misspell this or was it just a Freudian error? :-D
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I'm not sure what's worse - baseball player names or Hungarian Nutation. Now where did I put that decoder ring?
Awww, you're making me question my worth as a human being... I appear to be the only person alive who thinks hungarian notation is great. I find it much more useful than that infernal camelCase. :suss: (Sunglasses because I cannot be seen in public after this).
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Then this has long since become a tradition and cannot be a horror :)
A while ago he asked me what he should have printed on my business cards. I said 'Wizard'. I read books which nobody else understand. Then I do something which nobody understands. After that the computer does something which nobody understands. When asked, I say things about the results which nobody understand. But everybody expects miracles from me on a regular basis. Looks to me like the classical definition of a wizard.
Well, try to debug a piece of code where all the variables are named Pippo01, Pippo02, Pippo03... I guess you will change your idea ;P
Bye By(t)e ;-)
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Hi, I'm merely passing this on following a conversation I had with my dad the other night but thought it deserved a mention. I've no reason to doubt him on this one. I think. A bit of background - my dad started work in computers back in the '70s (and did indeed use punch cards and such like). Eventually, they had a simple editor, higher-level languages were being used and programs were getting more complex and at some point, contractors from the States were over writing some applications for them. He claims he still shudders at the memory of looking at their code after they'd gone and discovering that they'd left a small chunk of their homeland behind - the majority of variable and function names were named after baseball players... Kev
At one place I worked, there was this idiot who named all his subroutines after Disney characters
BALR 8, GOOFY
Another place had code from consultants that was complete alphabet soup with no comments.
function doIT (a, b, c, d, e)
But one guy I worked with insisted all routines and variables had to be 8 characters long. His method was to come up with a description like "Print Spooler" and then divide 8 by the number of words and then use those characters to make the label "PRINT SPOOLER" becomes "PRINSPOO". All well and good until you come up with a name like "SHIPPING STATION CONTROL LOOP" which became "SHSTCOLO" (pronounced "sheh steh coe low").
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11
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Well, try to debug a piece of code where all the variables are named Pippo01, Pippo02, Pippo03... I guess you will change your idea ;P
Bye By(t)e ;-)
Actually, that would not hold me up very long. But you are right, it's not good style as the restrictions to naming variables have become history. Long ago, when the Atari 800 still used to be a good machine, I 'unprotected' a game which turned out to be written in BASIC. They used a simple encryption to disguise it and also 'obfuscated' the BASIC code by renaming all variables to something like X1, X2 ... X3456. I even still remember which game it was :) Before that I used to write machine language programs on my first little computer where even an assembler was a luxury. At this level your program is just a heap of hexadecimal values, but I'm still used to it. Recently I restored one of my earliest programs from the old cassette tapes and posted it to be used with emulators or the few surviving real machines.
A while ago he asked me what he should have printed on my business cards. I said 'Wizard'. I read books which nobody else understand. Then I do something which nobody understands. After that the computer does something which nobody understands. When asked, I say things about the results which nobody understand. But everybody expects miracles from me on a regular basis. Looks to me like the classical definition of a wizard.
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At one place I worked, there was this idiot who named all his subroutines after Disney characters
BALR 8, GOOFY
Another place had code from consultants that was complete alphabet soup with no comments.
function doIT (a, b, c, d, e)
But one guy I worked with insisted all routines and variables had to be 8 characters long. His method was to come up with a description like "Print Spooler" and then divide 8 by the number of words and then use those characters to make the label "PRINT SPOOLER" becomes "PRINSPOO". All well and good until you come up with a name like "SHIPPING STATION CONTROL LOOP" which became "SHSTCOLO" (pronounced "sheh steh coe low").
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11
BrainiacV wrote: "Another place had code from consultants that was complete alphabet soup with no comments."
function doIT (a, b, c, d, e)
Hey, I think they stole that method from the place where I used to work! :) ;) Also the desire to limit names to 8 characters should have died when programing languages started supporting longer names.
Just because the code works, it doesn't mean that it is good code.
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BrainiacV wrote: "Another place had code from consultants that was complete alphabet soup with no comments."
function doIT (a, b, c, d, e)
Hey, I think they stole that method from the place where I used to work! :) ;) Also the desire to limit names to 8 characters should have died when programing languages started supporting longer names.
Just because the code works, it doesn't mean that it is good code.
I could handle the 8 character limitation better than I could the output from another coder working in a language that supported 32 character names. He liked creating long names that ran up to the limit. That wasn't the bad part (aside from making statements cover multiple lines to get anything done), the bad part was that he couldn't spell! So now you had to type all these long names with his mis-spellings. Sometimes his names didn't make sense "FireHunterSeekerBlowBackTo" :wtf:
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11
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For a Pascal class many years ago I used nonsense words and the type was indicated by the number of syllables. :cool:
I want say where but at a past place of programmig (coudl be school or work) we came up with the below as a joke to see who could cathc on. It was for osmething that was not production so we didn;t have to worry about actually hurting any user, just havings ome fun... The below I just pseudo code to demonstrate the variable names and functions we came up with: DIM iWTFIT01 DIM sWTFIT02 DECLARE FUNCTION iWTFDID(sWTFAMI02 AS STRING) AS BOOLEAN Can you guess the pattern?
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I could handle the 8 character limitation better than I could the output from another coder working in a language that supported 32 character names. He liked creating long names that ran up to the limit. That wasn't the bad part (aside from making statements cover multiple lines to get anything done), the bad part was that he couldn't spell! So now you had to type all these long names with his mis-spellings. Sometimes his names didn't make sense "FireHunterSeekerBlowBackTo" :wtf:
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11