Sucking (was Re: How can I avoid Using a Semaphore? (long))

["Mark Lundquist" <mark@rational.com>]

DuckE <nospam_steved94@home.com> wrote in message
news:b89b6.298508$U46.9559869@news1.sttls1.wa.home.com...

> [Mark wrote:]
> >
> > P.S.  Your identifier style sucks.  (Why mince words? :-) :-) :-)
>
> Any style of code with which you are unfamiliar "sucks".

Actually, no... :-)  "This is unfamiliar", and "This sucks" are two
distinctly different reactions :-)

I have specific reasons for believing it sucks, which have nothing to do
with unfamiliarity :-)  You probably know most of them already, so unless
someone wants to discuss it I won't go there :-).  But what I presume you
mean
is that this style conveys benefits that I'm unable to appreciate without
having actually worked with it for a period of time (approximately two weeks
it, would appear :-).  I'll just have to take your word for that!

It seems clear enough what the style is...  Each package has a full name,
with an acronymic prefix.  Then each identifier declared therein gets that
same acronym as a suffix.  OK... nope, sorry! :-)  I think it would take me
more than 2 weeks to forget how I got along without that... :-)

The style of "aFoobar" and "anApteryx" for type names seems like a different
form of the "The_Foobar" cop-out for parameter names -- both meant to spare
us the trouble of thinking up a parameter name that would be more meaningful
than just repeating the name of the type, am I right?  (Interestingly, the
orthography seems derived from the Smalltalk environment and the books by
Adele Goldberg, et al... but in Smalltalk, the sense is completely the
opposite: this style of naming is used not for types, but for method
arguments, because since it's an untyped language you need a parameter name
like "aList" as a cue to the reader that the actual is supposed  to be of
type List!)

>  Every time someone
> new comes to our group we hear the same comment.  Usually it takes less
than
> 2 weeks and they never know how they did without it.

I just really dislike all identifier format conventions.  That goes for
Hungarian notation, "suffix inflectional", etc.  I don't care if it's
Subsaharan pluperfect transfusional or whatever, I give 'em all the
heave-ho!!  Just keep it natural.  Yeah I know, that's just my personal
preference... Like the pronunciation of "bona fide" [:-) :-)], it's
ultimately a matter of taste...  I used to use a format convention for
identifiers, but I grew out of it.

An aside, relating naming conventions to this idea of "class-oriented
programming"...  One of the supposed advantages of "member function"
notation and distinguished-receiver syntax is that within a method, you
don't have to qualify references to members of the current instance by some
parameter name.  It's considered lame and lowbrow and "procedural" to have
to do
that.  Not too long ago, I was working with some C++ code where the
developers had adopted a curious naming convention for member objects...
they were all given names like "m_Foo", "m_Bar", where the "m_" stood for --
you guessed it -- "member".  How bizarre to resort to a naming convention to
work around what is supposed to be an advantage of the language.  Even
admitting that it isn't an advantage after all, writing "this->Foo" is so
much more natural -- anyone can understand that without having to learn some
convention! :-) :-)

Best Regards,
Mark