this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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U nd to rembr tht mny snr devs grw up prgrmng on old hrdwr tht ddn't hv mch mmry & oftn th lang ony allwd shrt var nms anywy. Also thy wr th gen of txtspk fr smlr rsns.
Yngr snr devs pckd up bd hbts frm tht gen.
And here's a sentence that's not squashed to cleanse your palettes / give a sigh of relief because I figure if I need a break from typing like that, you need a break from reading it.
Nmng thngs s hrd.
I’ve been at this for 25 years and a restriction on variable name length hasn’t been a problem since then.
A good senior dev shouldn’t just be older, they should have continued to learn and evolve.
I do remember texting abbreviations because we texted on a number pad with no autocomplete.
Everyone I know was happy to switch to better keyboards and autocomplete as soon as they were available.
Speak for yourself. My company only stopped using Fortran this decade.
And with "this decade" you mean within the last 10 years or since 2020? Either way, I'm scared... Just kidding, if this is a bank we're talking about, they're actually ahead of the curve.
I was mostly poking (heh) fun at myself, (also) a member of the generation I spoke about. Very much not a professional, but I do code a little, and know about the non-triviality of naming things.
Also also, for reasons I won't go into, my phone is still a flip phone.
Fck ff wth yr rbtrr lngth vrbl nms.
I started coding with TurboBasic which allowed variable names of any length but the compiler only looked at the first two letters (and case-insensitive at that), so DOUGHNUT_COUNT and DoobieCounter were actually the same variable. Good times debugging that kind of shit.
Yeah, I was thinking of old 8-bit computers that did the same ignore-after-second-char thing. Most people didn't bother typing the extra characters though because 1) those characters took up valuable memory and 2) if you accidentally put a keyword in the middle of your longer name, the tokeniser would see it and assume it was a keyword.
e.g. Calling your variable
FORGETseemed like a good idea until you got a syntax error becauseFORandGETare both keywords.FOit is, then. Or justF.COLORwas cursed too;ORis usually a keyword, even ifCOLORitself isn't. British EnglishCOLOURmight save you here, but you're still losing those four extra bytes.Jks on u I invntd my own lphbt onc, whr vwls r a mrk n th nxt lttr nstd of seprt lttrs. I gt vry gd at rdng cnsnnts.
My generation. Many of us learned and adapted over time, and use perfectly decent variable names now.
Nope. Got my first cell phone 8 years into my professional life, and 18-20 years after I started programming. Txtspkrs r th nxt gnrtn. Whippersnappers!
Now get the hell off my lawn!