Comments on: A Public Service Announcement To All Programmers

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:41:11 +0000

I pity the foo.

/shows age

By: The Management

The Management — Tue, 02 May 2006 19:33:01 +0000

Tim: Nah, of course not. My rant was triggered by all my computer science profs over the past couple of years who insist on using foo and bar. Besides, I haven’t looked at a single line of SLUDGE code in two months!

By: Rikard

Rikard — Tue, 02 May 2006 18:06:19 +0000

I said I’ve been guilty of overusing single-letter variables, but I’d never give a global variable a single letter name. That’s just… well, there are sites dedicated for that sort of thing.

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 02 May 2006 07:53:26 +0000

After reading this I went and search the SLUDGE help file to make sure it’s not that which triggered your li’l rant. Whew, looks like I’m in the clear. Unless it’s one of the things on the forums. Hang on.

Hey, nothing there, too! Who’d have thought it?

Single-letter variables are the invention of some other-worldly demonic code beast. At work, one of our programmers thought it was a good idea to introduce a global variable called ‘g’. It was an array. Nobody was quite sure what it did, but I think the program broke without it. He’s left now, although ‘g’ probably still lives on while we try to fathom what it’s for.

By: Kejero

Kejero — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 19:57:30 +0000

I use moo a lot in real life.

By: The Management

The Management — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 18:53:14 +0000

HAHA! Oddly enough, I used “moo” on a recent exam.

By: RobSource

RobSource — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 18:45:05 +0000

I myself am partial to “Moo” and “Face.”
I name my variables after ridiculous nicknames for asinine managers at TELUS.

I guess that would count as a nonsense variable name… I should start naming them after my family, that would be funny. “Man” “Ooch” “New” “Wife”

By: Jozef

Jozef — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 05:18:33 +0000

From Wikipedia, here’s a list of alternative variable names: sapfu, snafu, susfu, fumtu, fubb, tarfu, tofu, gfu, samfu, tuifu, fugazi, janfu, jaafu, dilligaf, tins and ihtfp

But seriously: I personally use more descriptive names, but if you work with a database on the other end and you have one hundred and thirty three variables variables with names like people_b4c5, attritor_price2 and managers_fc_less_benefits, thinks can get really FUBAR.

By: The Management

The Management — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 20:33:16 +0000

Yay!

I don’t have as much of a problem with nonsense variable names, as long as they’re actually creative and clever. However, I definitely think it makes life easier for everyone if variable names actually make some sense within the context of the programming example. Even if it’s just an example, using a practical application to demonstrate said example helps me learn far better than having to make my way around some code that doesn’t really do anything useful.

By: gudrun

gudrun — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 08:11:58 +0000

haha, i totally agree with you! actually that’s the first thing i tell my students in the programming classes: not to use nonsense variable names. and as i’m the one correcting their stuff… *hehe*
wikipedia told me that fubar is originally an abbreviation of the german word “furchtbar” what means horrible – which says all about using foo and bar as variable names.