Programmer Humor

I remember an old mentor programmer I had who basically described his job as building an addition to an addition to an addition on a tree house built in a twig.

Wait, what do you mean x3, y2, and x37 are not good variable names?

Vedal made this post

All these jokes about naming variables and yet no serious suggestions that if you have a turtle2, what you really need is a turtle array. I like to block out all the memory I'll need for the whole program up front, put it all in one big array, and then I can use clean, easy to remember numbers for all my variables!

All great code started out as a shitty work-around that happened to work.

(I say this as someone with one of the more prestigious pedigrees in "not writing shit code". All the theory I've learned helps, but at the end of the day the most important qualities of a line of code are: whether it got the job done, and whether is was obviously correct enough that the next developer left it alone.)

Because I mostly (almost exclusively) write shell scripts, my vars are often like this: theList, workingDir, etc.

I'm a monster. But it works for me.

This is a very cute thread. I love turtles and I like them for their vast computer science skills too.

Based LOGO programmer.

An array?

var turtles = new Turtle[] { new Turtle(), new Turtle() };

Don't do this :P

Fucking mathematicians

Try assembly language! You have registers, and they are named for you with highly memorable names like R17.

Yes your variable names should indeed all be different from one another.

var Turtle1 var Turtle1 var Turtle1

just doesn't quite have the same impact:-).

I always make sure my variables are named in ways I can remember what they're for. The only time I just use generic var1, var2, etc is if I am experimenting with a function I've never used before and wanna play around with it to see how it's used.

This should be easily read by others but there could be times where it's an inside joke.

Yes, its code whether it executes or not.

Yeah, a name should describe what it is or does, so if you have two turtles, and let's say turtle1 wants to shit on turtle2's lawn, you could name them shittingTurtle and victimTurtle. If the name alone tells you what its purpose is, that saves a lot of time for people looking at your code.

Is_Turtle is not a bad variable name because it tells you it is a Boolean with "is" and that the Boolean tells you whether something is a turtle or not.

Also, depending on the language, I suggest either camelCase or snake_case naming of variables. PascalCase is usually for defining classes or in case of C#, methods.