Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mouse_ 562 days ago
This works great if you're absolutely certain no other poor sap is going to have to work with your code. I do this myself for personal scripts!

Otherwise, please prioritize readability.

3 comments

I think needing to work out what it is by asking someone or reading documentation or whatever is a feature, not a bug here.

If you instead used a word that kinda described what it is without being able to explain specifics people might make assumptions. If they have to go "what the hell is a kep" and then ask you then you can be sure they'll find out about the implementation that's slightly different from other keps, or the weird bug that happens when you do y, or the handy library for doing kep things or whatever before they waste time going down the wrong path.

Obviously this sort of thing should be done sparingly, otherwise you end up with a completely incomprehensible codebase - but for specific things are are genuinely novel I think it could help with overall grokability rather than hinder it.

It’s one made-up name in a 30,000 line codebase. I think if anyone else ever works with the project they’ll have a lot harder things to catch up on than this convention
Documentation is probably better than readability because readability makes a lot of assumptions arising from being close to the code...for example, Swedish names are not gonna be all that readable for most programmers (this holds true for English names as well).