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What's the Craziest Variable or Function Name You've Encountered?

dev.to staff on June 17, 2023

Have you ever stumbled upon an hilarious or quirky variable and function name? A clever pun, an inside joke, or a moment of pure coding creativity ...
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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard •

When I was an intern at a big telecom company, there was one strange guy who wrote his function names in greek.

He wasn't greek either, but he wanted to teach greek to his son when he would grow up because there was some greek ancestry in the family.
He needed some practice with greek and found it at work.

I'm not sure if this was crazy or genius.
I'm not even sure it the limit between both is always clear.

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manchicken profile image
Mike Stemle •

APL is a programming language which requires either a special terminal or terminal emulator, as it uses Greek graphemes as part of the language.

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Mitch Chimwemwe Chanza •

Genius 🤣

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manchicken profile image
Mike Stemle •

I have a habit for naming things descriptively, and since my typing speed is decent, I've named entire projects with pretty long names. I am the proud maintainer of an open source GitHub Action called datadog-service-catalog-metadata-provider. I've also been known to name things in frustration, such as a program I wrote once called "spit out stupid objects" or "soso" for short.

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Phil Nash •

I've always liked React's __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED.

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Jake Lundberg •

came across a function named deleteOldPeople a few years ago. still makes me chuckle.

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Bernd Wechner •

A function argument called yeah_but_nah.

I think you'd have to be Australian to understand that this means essentially the same as an argument called dry_run which is a common command line argument on risky irreversible operations, that runs through the whole process without actual writing or committing any changes.

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Mitch Chimwemwe Chanza •

static 'reading-pgs' = async () =>{}

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Ken Bellows •

I'll be honest... I never realized that string properties could be declared that way in javascript, with no square brackets or anything

const me = {
    'say hello'(name) {
        console.log('Hello', name)
    }
}
me['say hello']('Mitch')
// logs 'Hello Mitch'
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hi_iam_chris profile image
Kristijan Pajtasev •

I remember this guy at my first job, but office in other country, he would name variables after himself. Like John1, John2 ... (john wasn't his name :) )