this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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I remember one GitHub project that implemented some algorithm (I think it was Dijkstra's) but only used 4 or 5 single letter variables and just kept reusing them.
When I was in college, I had a guy that I was working on a project with that did this constantly. At one point I looked at one of his files and the variables were named a, b, c, aa, ab, ac, ba, bb, etc. That when I was like, bro, you gotta stop doing this.
"Inside you there are two wolves..." or something:
Option 1: Sit down with them and go line by line through it. Make him identify each variable's purpose and then immediately find and replace to rename every instance with a more descriptive name.
Option 2: Small script to shuffle the variable names in his code around after each of his commits.
The guy thinks in Excel.
When you are used to math equations, it's easy to slip into that habit.
Single letter variables, yes. Reusing them? No.
Only if they are well-known in the language you’re using or domain you’re writing for.
xandyare fine for coordinates.iandjare fine for loop indices. But abbreviating things unnecessarily is bad IMO.s = GetSession()is too terse, for example.No, I mean single-letter vars are standard in physics and math, but reusing vars is not acceptable. Obviously they're not good practice except in the scenarios you describe, but mathies gonna math.
Length might have mattered in the 80s and 90s when IDEs were crap but we got autocomplete in pretty much all our text editors (even TUI ones like vim).
As for readability there is an argument to be had in specific contexts, but 9 out of 10 times it makes more sense to use a proper word.
Example:
In this case using
itemin the place ofiwould be more fitting.Maybe they had a background in low-level assembly code? If you're writing assembly that's kinda sorta how you'd handle registers.