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by snicker7 1992 days ago
> assigning a descriptive identifier to each step

Working with data scientists, in practice, these identifiers are usually "arr1", "arr2", &c. I'd rather have method chaining. Often the intermediates are not meaningful.

1 comments

I agree with you in general, people (especially data scientists) are bad at naming things.

It's probably the core skill of good programmers though, so it should be taught more. I don't think anyone sets out to use misleading names, but it's easy for name and code to diverge, and it's crippling to readability.

However, often when refactoring/updating such data scientist code (or even understanding), I need to break apart the long method chains, and this is much, much more annoying than dealing with crummy names.

At least I can print the values associated with the names, which is not easily possible in the really long method chain.