“It’s just easier to type” and other lies you believe

    • mustardman@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I worked with a complier that would assume only compare the first 8 characters and would treat it the same afterwards.

      Compiler copyright was around 1990.

      Edit: This was for function names in C

    • NateSwift@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ve heard arguments that back in ye old days each row only had 80 characters and variable names were shortened so you didn’t have to scroll the page back and forth

      • Knusper@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’ve already felt like I should choose shorter names in a (shitty) project where the customer asked us to use an auto-formatter and a max line-width of 120 characters.

        Because ultimately, I choose expressive variable names for readability. But an auto-formatter gladly fucks up your readability, breaking your line at some random ass point, unless your line does not need to be broken up.

        And so you start negotiating whether you really need certain information in a variable name for the price of badly broken lines.

          • Knusper@feddit.de
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yeah, I meant it as an example, where I was still granted relatively luxurious conditions, but even those already caused me to compromise on variable names.

            I’d say, 95% of my lines of code do fit into 120 characters easily. It’s those 5% that pained me.

    • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      They did, with core you could be paying for many dollars per bit of memory. They also often used teletypes, where you would pay in ink and time for every character.