this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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I remember one GitHub project that implemented some algorithm (I think it was Dijkstra's) but only used 4 or 5 single letter variables and just kept reusing them.
When I was in college, I had a guy that I was working on a project with that did this constantly. At one point I looked at one of his files and the variables were named a, b, c, aa, ab, ac, ba, bb, etc. That when I was like, bro, you gotta stop doing this.
"Inside you there are two wolves..." or something:
Option 1: Sit down with them and go line by line through it. Make him identify each variable's purpose and then immediately find and replace to rename every instance with a more descriptive name.
Option 2: Small script to shuffle the variable names in his code around after each of his commits.
The guy thinks in Excel.