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    Thoughts around naming variables ☶ api programming cerebralab.com
    George3d6 avatar authored by George3d6 1 month ago | cached | 3 comments

Not the original title I gave it, but I thought that one was potentially to clickbaity for people not familiar with the source quote, so I changed it.

Overall it’s just a bunch of thoughts trying to explore the subject of naming variables, not sure if anything is useful or original, but I hope at least some of the questions I raise serve as a bit of inspiration.

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    orib avatar orib edited 1 month ago | link

    It’s interesting to me that that of the three examples:

    function clac_quarterly_interest(principal, rate, quarters):
    return principal*rate*time

    function claculate_quarterly_interest(principal, rate, quarters):
    quarterly_returns = multiply(principal, rate)
    return multiply(quarterly_returns, time)

    and

    i(p,r,q)=p*r*q

    Only the last one is the one with no glaring errors: the other two use nonexistent variables, and both calculate and its abbreviation are misspelled.

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      vladislavp avatar vladislavp 1 month ago | link

      It seems that there is some sort of an axiom or theorem emerging:

      Every article about variable naming must begin with that Phil Karlton’s quote

      “ There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. — Phil Karlton “

      [1] https://hackernoon.com/the-art-of-naming-variables-52f44de00aad

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        spc476 avatar spc476 1 month ago | link

        I always heard the quote as “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.”