I sort of agree with some points, especially the ones about dynamic identifier creation and renaming identifiers, but those last 2 to me sounds a lot like you don’t know how to search beyond the really basic “I want this string here”, I’m assuming that it’s an effort to enable whoever comes next to search and find everything they should find mindlessly, not knowing the project, since the author talks about navigating foreign code bases, but I think compromises can be made when you should expect just a bit more effort from contributors for the sake of a more rationally organised code base
It’s really about lowering cognitive load when making edits. It’s not necessarily that someone can’t figure out how to do something more sophisticated, but that they’re more likely to get things right if the code is just kind of straightforwardly dumb.
The last two are definitely situational – changing things like that might lower cognitive load for one kind of work but raise it significantly for another – but I can see where they’re coming from with those suggestions.
+1 for avoiding dynamically constructed identifiers when possible. Fulltext search across multiple files is available in most tools, let it be useful. It sucks having to search for a substring, hoping you guessed the way it gets constructed. Plus, it might not even occur to you that this is what you need to try.
Greppability also contributed to this thingy
int
main()
{
// dam
}
in Mozilla C-style and GNU C-style projects. Of course, it’s a remnant of the past (grep ^main), but kgmgaehgka.
I agree with the first point. Always go for clarity over cleverness.
I somewhat disagree with the second point. Consistency is important. Stick with the same name when possible. But I think mixing camel case and snake case should be avoided. It can make the code less ”greppable” IMO, because now you need to remember which casing was used for each variable.
Kind of agree on the third point. I think flatness should be preferred when possible and when it makes sense. Easier to find the variables with the eyes rather than having to search through nested structures.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t like short variable names, especially single letters (unless for very narrow use and obvious like i).
There was a senior dev at my first job that we called Lord Voldemort and he was the king of ungreppable variable names. Short, full of common characters, and none of them actually described what they were doing. I swear he only used characters that appeared in C++ keywords, so looking for fo would invariably tag every for statement in the file.
He also had hooks set up to notify when anyone was in his area of the code and you’d always get a two-hour phonecall where he’d slowly wear you down and browbeat you into backing out your changes. Every time I pulled a ticket in his codebase I’d internally shudder. He was friends and/or had dirt on the CTO so he just remained in that role and made everyone’s life hell.
