Programming

17498 readers

28 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

123

A quick tip for better variable names (self.programming)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sisyphean to c/programming

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Whenever you store a value that has a unit in a variable, config option or CLI switch, include the unit in the name. So:

maxRequestSize => maxRequestSizeBytes
elapsedTime => elapsedSeconds
cacheSize => cacheSizeMB
chargingTime => chargingTimeHours
fileSizeLimit => fileSizeLimitGB
temperatureThreshold => temperatureThresholdCelsius
diskSpace => diskSpaceTerabytes
flightAltitude => flightAltitudeFeet
monitorRefreshRate => monitorRefreshRateHz
serverResponseTimeout => serverResponseTimeoutMs
connectionSpeed => connectionSpeedMbps

EDIT: I know it’s better to use types to represent units. Please don’t write yet another comment about it. You can find my response to that point here: https://programming.dev/comment/219329

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] sisyphean 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Related: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

TL;DR: there is good and bad Hungarian notation. Encoding types (like string or int) in variable names is bad. Encoding information that cannot be expressed in the type system is good. (Though with the development of type systems, more and more of those concepts can be moved into the types, keeping variable names clean.)

But as a Hungarian, I'm obviously a little biased :)