Hungarian UIs

[Clifford Nelson]

Think a big reason that it has disappeared is that display space is not as valuable. There was also the issue of calling something strName, well Name is probably going to be a string anyway, so sort of redundant. In the case of UI there is more TextBoxName vs txtName.

[Lost User]

Interesting question... When it is up to me, I dabbled fairly recently to using ux as a prefix for all GUI controls - and not naming any controls that don't require a name. So I would have uxCustomerName and uxCustomerNameLabel assuming both were referenced in code somewhere. Makes it obvious which variables belong to the GUI, keeps label and control variables adjacent alphabetically, allows me to change from a text box to a combo without any bother of renaming. But old habits die hard and I still find myself using txtCustomerName!

MVVM# - See how I did MVVM my way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')

[PIEBALDconsult]

c2423 wrote:

lblSomething is clearly meant to be a label which is next to txtSomething

Exactly. What else are ya gonna do? And there's this: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong[^]

[JimmyRopes]

c2423 wrote:

it still seems prevalent in UI programming - for example I might have lblSomething next to txtSomething.

Yes I still use it for controls but not for variables any more.

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[jschell]

Joe Woodbury wrote:

Simonyi's paper makes this reasonably clear,

Yes it does. From that paper (Table 4.) "b Byte, not necessarily holding a coded character, more akin to w." Are you suggesting that "b" is used to represent something besides the data type of the variable from the above phrase?

[Joe Woodbury]

jschell wrote:

Are you suggesting that "b" is used to represent something besides the data type of the variable from the above phrase?

Read the damn paper. The b is an exception to his use of notation to indicate the usage of a variable. You are deliberately ignoring the other tables which are blindingly clear. Look at table 2 and table 3. Even table 4 save for two damn rows. Then read his whole damn discussion on the color red. What does "co" stand for? Simonyi states: "As suggested above, the concept of "type" in this context is determined by the set of operations that can be applied to a quantity."

[YvesDaoust]

It seems obvious that these two controls belong together. So it makes sense to group them in a single class "LabeledText", having two fields: "Something.Label" and "Something.Text". With the added benefit that the class can automatically enforce coherence of the two controls.

[Jonathan C Dickinson]

lblUsername, txtUsername That's why. The 'correct' solution is presented by WPF (and HTML): you don't *need* to name controls. However, when I am doing Winforms: usernameTextBox, usernameLabel. No idea why, it's just style preference (or possibly hungarian aversion).

He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does not ask a question remains a fool forever. [Chinese Proverb] Jonathan C Dickinson (C# Software Engineer)

[irneb]

YvesDaoust wrote:

With the added benefit that the class can automatically enforce coherence of the two controls.

Some older libraries actually did do it this way. One that jumps to mind is Delphi's Borland Foundation Classes. But then you also ended up with other issues, e.g. say you wanted the label above the control? Do you need to make a new container class for that? Or do you need to extend the base container so it had a prop to state left/top/right/bottom -label. Or do you make like BFC did by having a 2nd location point for the label so it could freely be moved about on the GUI-Designer yet still snap to the "default" positions. But worse: if you want to align controls, you want it to ignore the label and align "controls", so your class needs to account for that too. And then what about stuff like font / colour / enabled / read-only / etc. are you going to expose all possibilities through pass-through properties, or rather just pass the child controls as public (i.e. breaking general OOP principles)? So your container class is not going to be a trivial thing at all, at least not for something you want to use extensively in various situations. IMO, if your current library doesn't provide such combined control+label classes, you're wasting your time making them simply to avoid prefixing / suffixing their variables. If you've got other reasons for doing so, then those are why you'd want to make such combined control. I do like the idea of a suffix for sorting purposes yes, but also I like the idea of intellisence / auto-complete picking up txt as well. So I'm a bit in 2 minds as to which one to use in preference. Though I do try to steer clear of tieing the name to some aspect of the control (e.g. I don't use txt for Text / cmb for Combo Box / tgl for Toggle / etc. etc. etc.) that just makes life more difficult on any change. I generally use lbl for labels and fld for inputs (i.e. "Field" like in a db form) even drop-downs/toggles.

[Stefan_Lang]

The name of a variable should indicate what it's used for, so I see no reason not to use Hungarian notation as a means to distinguish between different kinds of UI components. Since there is only a limited number of different components, it makes sense to abbreviate them rather than using the full name.

[Gary Wheeler]

Hungarian notation is an abomination before God :suss:. Besides, everyone knows that the proper naming convention is _Something__label, _Something__value, etc. :-D

Software Zen: delete this;

[Gary Wheeler]

Jonathan C Dickinson wrote:

ernameTextBox, usernameLabel

That makes two[^] of us doing it properly, although I find your fondness for camel case morally repugnant.

Software Zen: delete this;

[Stephen Dycus]

I guess I'm going to have to disagree with everyone here. What happened to verbosity being a good thing in software development? Prefixing variables referencing UI objects makes your code more self documenting. I know that txtFirstName is an editable text box and firstName is most likely just a string. If you remove ui prefixes, all bets are off. You no longer have any indication as to what a variable's type/implementation is without either scrolling up to its declaration or hovering over the variable in a compatible IDE. The argument that changing the type of the variable is difficult is largely not the case anymore. The modern IDE has *at least* find and replace, and most have a right click -> Refactor -> Rename option. Should we really sacrifice self documentation for the off chance that a text box reference will be changed to a label?

[Stuart Rubin]

In general, a reason NOT to use Hungarian Notation is that it keeps the programmer from abstracting the data from the type. In fact, it does the opposite. For UI controls, the variables are NOT abstract from the control; they are intrinsically linked. They are one in the same. There's nothing to make more abstract from a variable "okButton." A button is a button, but an Uint16 could be just about anything. So, I say using the Hungarian-like notation for specific control types makes sense.

[Bob1000]

Nothing wrong with Hungarian notation, I am quite happy to see it used, provided it attracts the death penalty! Preferable by the good old Hungarian folk method of hanging drawing and quartering....)

[Bob1000]

Is the iPhone Hungarian?

[Chrisgo]

I tend to take that a little farther. I like the longer, more verbose names, they seem more clear to me. But, I consider those to be class level variables. So, I'll tack on a '_' prefix. I would then have _firstNameLabel.

[DarkChuky CR]

Well, I use the full name: TextBoxSomething, LabelSomething.... just because I follow the tendency to use verbose... and it's easier to read. New developers (juniors, just graduated) will always understand that TextBoxSomething is a TextBox and they don't need to know anything about bulgarian... let say txtSomething: a textbox? justa text, like a label, a string? dunno... in other words make your code as readable as possible (for dummies, if you need to have a degree and 6 years experience to read my code... there is something wrong) then being verbose helps a lot. (ok ok, we know that this make your code lines go bigger but then you will also add some other standards...) also, this is just what I like, bulgarian is 1000% better than TextBox x,y,b,a = new TextBox();

[patbob]

The hungarian notation prefix was a memory mnemonic. It disappeared because of things like intellisense, name completion, and go-to-definition shortcuts, which provide the same features without the need for the mnemonic, and work ten times better. Nowdays, I only use it when intellisense, name completion, go-to-declaration are not available in the editor. In UI usage, I use a naming scheme (not hungarian) to provide a clue of which controls are related to each other. The text box that displays a string, and the label on the dialog that indicates to the user what that text box contains, are related. However, unless I'm going to manipualte the label, I don't need a member variable for it and have been known to set GenerateMember to False.

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

[gggustafson]

But if you are serious about UI programming (in WinForms, WebForms, and Mobile Apps) you want to imply a TextBox (WinForms).

Gus Gustafson