this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
411 points (94.8% liked)

Programmer Humor

19589 readers
620 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

"It's just easier to type" and other lies you believe

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (20 children)

Seriously though, why? Is there historic reasons for that? Did they have to pay extra for more letters back in the day?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I’ve heard arguments that back in ye old days each row only had 80 characters and variable names were shortened so you didn’t have to scroll the page back and forth

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've already felt like I should choose shorter names in a (shitty) project where the customer asked us to use an auto-formatter and a max line-width of 120 characters.

Because ultimately, I choose expressive variable names for readability. But an auto-formatter gladly fucks up your readability, breaking your line at some random ass point, unless your line does not need to be broken up.

And so you start negotiating whether you really need certain information in a variable name for the price of badly broken lines.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

120 characters is quite much, though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I meant it as an example, where I was still granted relatively luxurious conditions, but even those already caused me to compromise on variable names.

I'd say, 95% of my lines of code do fit into 120 characters easily. It's those 5% that pained me.

load more comments (16 replies)