OT: Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many Programmers

[J. Landman Gay]

On 10/11/18 5:57 PM, Mark Wieder via use-livecode wrote:
> On 10/09/2018 11:05 AM, Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami via use-livecode wrote:
> 
>>    ITT 2016 - Kevlin Henney - Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many
>>    Programmers
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsHMHukIlJY
> 
> Kevlin Henney is always an entertaining speaker.
> 

I watched some of this and he talked about a couple of my personal pet 
peeeves. The first is excessive commenting, and while I'm all in favor 
of commenting code, sometimes it tends to the ridiculous. I agree with 
Henney's remark that good code is self-descriptive, and LC does that 
better than anything else. I've seen 20 lines of comment above a 10-line 
handler, sometimes set off in a fancy ascii rectangle. Each to his own, 
I guess. It's mildly annoying but I can ignore it.

The one the bothers me more though is what he calls "LegoNaming." I 
remember being irritated when MC introduced "blendLevel" because it was 
too long to type quickly, and at the time was one of the longest entries 
in the dictionary. I got over that pretty quick when we started to see 
things like windowBoundingRect and fullScreenMode. But some of the new 
commands and messages are approaching unusability because they are 
impossible to remember and hard to type correctly, and usually require a 
dictionary lookup/copy/paste. We've got iphoneGetNotificationBadgeValue 
and AVPlayerItemFailedToPlayToEndTimeNotification. But the top entry in 
this category is mergBLEPeripheralDiscoverDescriptorsForCharacteristic. 
That's not a term, it's a sentence.

C'mon guys. I understand how descriptive, specific names that indicate 
precise usage may be desirable, but if the term runs off the right edge 
of the dictionary it's gone too far.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com