It's a small critique, I'm sorry it got upvoted by other people.
It's a brain scramble because you can't just read in toto.
Well, you can literally, but, you don't feel like you grok it.
And when you take a second pass you gotta slow down and stop and parse "what's r here? is it relevant? oh rows?"
It's one of those things that's hard to describe because it doesn't sound like much if you got it. And this example is trivial, especially if you're not open to the idea its a problem (r/c = rows/columns) But it's nigh-impenetrable in other scenarios.
You feel like you're barely understanding something that you actually might grok completely.
I agree, it's highly context-specific.
In a small demo for a small blog post with basically no complexity? Go ahead, use 1 character variable names, it really isn't difficult.
In the 1000 long CUDA kernel where you barely understand what's going on even though you understand the concepts? I'd be favoring longer descriptive names than one letter names for sure.
It takes time for the contrarian dynamic to work itself out (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and once that happens, the original problem subsides but and the secondary problem (shallow objection to the objection) sticks out like a sore thumb.
It's usually enough to downvote (or, in egregious cases) flag a post that shouldn't be at the top. In really egregious cases, emailing [email protected] is also a fine idea.
From the guidelines: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In just 4 lines you have r, row, t, ri, l, i and c.
The full variables names are so short anyway that personally I'd write them out. Code does evolve and there's a risk of this suffering as a result.
RowIndexFactoryGeneratorService rowIndexFactoryGeneratorService = new RowIndexFactoryGeneratorService();
RowIndexFactory rowIndexFactory = rowIndexFactoryGeneratorService.getTheFactoryOrSomethingIDontCare();
RowIndex rowIndex = rowIndexFactoryGeneratorService.generateRowIndex();As someone who likes to program in Haskell, I feel this pain very strongly. :)
```python
bar = [foo(e) for e in elements]
```
I like to joke, "you think programmers are bad at naming thing, you should see the mathematicians, programmers are infants before the infernal naming sense of the common mathematician".
This one hurts the most. Save a few bytes for an ungodly amount of mental friction.
that's like saying in spoken language "don't ever use pronouns, or even first or nicknames, use full given names"
https://cgtweb1.tech.purdue.edu/courses/cgt456/Private/Readi...
If you're going to use short names at least make it clear which belong together. Especially don't use different lengths when things ought to be similar.
data.forEach((row,i) => row.forEach((ele,j) => ... )) > document.createElement("table").rows[Symbol.iterator]()
// Array Iterator { constructor: Iterator() }
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLTableEl...
const te = document.createElement('table');
document.body.appendChild(te);
[
['one', 'two', 'three'],
['four', 'five', 'six' ],
].forEach((r, i) => {
const re = te.insertRow(i);
r.forEach((c, j) => {
re.insertCell(j).innerText = c;
})
});
Disclaimer: I have not tested the code and I only write JavaScript once every few years and when I do I am unhappy about it.
As for variables, I (again personally) find it taxing to have many variables in scope, so I do net see their presence as a universal good. If we instead simply use expressions, then there is no need to concern yourself with whether the variable will come into play later on. Thus, I think it increases clarity and favour that over the ease of future modification argument you propose (heck, I would argue that you get better diffs even if you force the variable declaration into a future modification).
As for bikeshedding this piece of code further, if I steal some ideas from chrismorgan [1] and embedding-shape [2] who appear to be way more seasoned JavaScript programmers than me:
const $t = document.createElement('table');
for (const r of
[
['one', 'two', 'three'],
['four', 'five', 'six' ],
]) {
const $r = $t.insertRow();
for (const e of r)
$r.insertCell().innerText = e;
};
document.body.append($t);