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Lazy names are lazy

Douglas R Andreani on March 20, 2018

If you are starting a project, but you have no idea how to call it, maybe just a placeholder, how do you name it?

My goto is Douglas1 or test1, how about yours?

Ben Halpern • Mar 20 '18

I use the word yolo all over my dev environment in various contexts.

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Mar 20 '18

When running each loops, I always assign the each variable as x, y, or z.

products.each do |x|
  x.orders.each do |y|
    y.destroy!
  end
end

Also, a lot of things are called asdf or some variation of that.

Douglas R Andreani • Mar 20 '18

I’m running on the “i”, “j” religion. But I can totally understand that

Slava Abakumov • Mar 21 '18

i, j, k FTW!

Gunnar Gissel • Mar 21 '18

Gotta respect that unit vector

Mac Siri • Mar 20 '18 • Edited

I name things based on what I'm thinking right at that moment.

hmm = User.first.name
huh = "lskdfjlksjdf"
what = /\(^[a-zA-Z0-9]+\)\.\([a-z]+\)/
damit = huh.gsub(what, hmm)

Dimitris Pliakos • Mar 21 '18 • Edited

lala is my favorite!

it's:

easy to remember (la two times)
extensible (lalalalala as long you want. I swear)
Hack-able (lala -> customization engine -> lolo | lili etc)

For times that laziness pass the upper limit, a, b, c are fine too :p

Scott Yeatts • Mar 22 '18 • Edited

Had a dev on a production app that I had to code review more times than I would have expected because he would use single letter variable names.

a = someValue

Made my heart sad every time I saw it.

Ross Henderson • Mar 22 '18

If I don't have a descriptive name for something, I won't do it. My manager and I have sat down for over a day before trying to figure out what to call certain things. For us, since we're creating a department, it's important that anyone could walk into the job and know exactly what we mean.

edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y • Mar 20 '18

I usually start with a name that I think captures what I'm working on. Maybe a branch name, or a directory name. Then about 2hours, or 2days later, I make a PR with a subject and branch name that absolutely don't line up.

Sometimes I'm right though, and it feels satisfying. But often wrong, for example, from today:

Branch: fix/trigger-action
PR Subject: "Fixes redundant InvalidateLayout in LayoutRole change"

Bence Hornyak • Mar 20 '18

temp or tmp most of the time.

rendall • Mar 21 '18

I don't do it. I will literally sit, flow-stopped, doing nothing, until I think of a good descriptive name.

Jonathan Nicholas • Mar 21 '18

I used i, j, k for loops, and every other letter for other variables.

Antonio Radovcic • Mar 21 '18

my first choice while learning a lang or lib is "hello x", like "hellodart".
Then, when I want to do something more involved, its usually dartymcdartface.

The commit-messages for my playaround-projects are mostly some song-lyrics that happen to play either in my head or headphones while i do the commit, like "bluebirds are so natural".

(Same with savegames back when one could name savegames in PC-games)