[arethuza]

But don't do what one memorably awful project I had to maintain did - to use that example they would have done:

country_code==FIFTY_FIVE and day_of_week==ONE

[spuz]

But what if the definition of 55 changes? You'll be glad to have your table of constants then.

[arethuza]

The project also defined HTTP, COLON, SLASH, WWW and DOT so that you would have:

   string url = HTTP + COLON + SLASH + SLASH + WWW + DOT ...

I swear I'm not making this up....

[chessturk]

Reminds me of http://pk.org/rutgers/notes/pikestyle.html

> "There is a famously bad comment style: ...

Don't laugh now, wait until you see it in real life."

[snovv_crash]

Well at least a typo sould give a compile time error for some subset of typos.

But in the trade-off in code readability was probably the cause of many other mistakes, so probably ended up further behind.

[rpmisms]

Sounds like a PHP codebase I'm currently working in. I shit you not, $LI = '<li>' is in the functions file, along with $LI_END.

[arethuza]

It was a very enterprisey Java codebase from the bad old days of J2EE - it had somewhere over 30 layers of abstractions between the code in a JSP and a web service call.

[NB 30 isn't an exaggeration - I think the vast team who wrote it were paid by the abstraction or something].

[nitrogen]

But how else will your compiler tell you that you mistyped 55? /s