I hate identifiers.
A bad dream last night
dragged me back to a project
I took over some years ago,
a Web shop bungled by its
original developers.
Their code implemented both shopping
baskets and the products
customers put into them
as arrays, using
numeric constants as field
selectors.
So when reading it,
you had to know that
prod[1] was a product's name
and prod[2] its price. If
bask is a shopping basket, you
had to know bask[1]
to be the total price of its
contents,
bask[2][N] the
N'th product therein,
and
bask[3] the delivery
charge. (The developers
dropped out of touch and out of Google.
Perhaps they're farming pigs.)
To help myself understand the mess, I coded
some access functions.
Thus product_to_name(prod)
returned the product
name prod[1];
basket_to_total_price(bask)
returned bask[1];
and basket_to_product(bask,N)
returned
bask[2][N].
I began to bring order to the
arrays amidst the disarray.
But the (ex-) developers
had written
huge tracts of
code for outputting baskets
in copious styles: as bulleted lists,
as tables, as PDF's for invoices,
as transaction logs. Code sharing
had not lain within
their world view. The system
went on and on
selecting products from baskets
then
printing their prices; and I
continually found myself having to type
product_to_price(basket_to_product(bask,N)).
Should I therefore define this as a
new function?
But what to name it?
The language had overloading, so should I
reuse
product_to_price, as in
product_to_price(bask,N)?
Or name it basket_to_product_price?
Or basketed_product_to_price?
Or
product_in_basket_to_price?
I sensed a returning listlessness,
the familiar onset of
Naming Fatigue.
Moreover, the implementation
was more complicated than I've
implied, having a level
between products
and baskets.
Because a customer
might purchase ten tins of
Kattomeat, say, or (after the meal, presumably)
ten sacks of Kitty Litter,
there were what
I suppose you'd call "product repetitions".
These were arrays of which one element held a product,
another the number of units bought, and the others
data about bulk discounts. I needed
access functions for these as well.
But what to call them?
— Perhaps product_in_basket_to_price?
— Ouch, no can do: I used that earlier.
— Well then, product_repetition_sequence_to_unit_price?
— Hmmm, typing that all the time will
be tedious, not to mention bringing on my RSI.
— What about bought_product_to_price?
— Well, no. Strictly speaking, the
product isn't bought
until the customer succeeds in paying for it.
— OK, putatively_bought_product_to_price?
— Let's not be silly.
— I know! I'll Joyce it and say
prorep_to_price.
— That's not too long — but
in six months' time, will I remember
what a prorep is? S'what comments
are for, I suppose.
— Oh hell oh bum, the Web shop also has data
structures to represent
product reports.
— I know! I'll get a job in China!
Because of the Norman invasion and the
fact that programmers are linguistically
descended from the lords who dined on
pork rather than the peasants who herded pigs, too many
English programming words
start with the same letters. Which usually seem to be
"tran", "pro", "re" and even "rep".
Chinese words can share common parts too; but
they're shorter. So, I'm thinking, when you can
write "product repetition" as
產品的重複
(if the dictionaries tell me correctly),
perhaps you don't need to agonise whether to
abbreviate as
prorep,
prodrep, prod_rep or prodRep.
Or
word_vec_long_ptr_ProductRepetitionSequence_shop_module_private_type.
Chinese words are not only short, they're graceful and refined. This one means "identifier". Intricate and elegant, let's look at it close up:
Here's "report":
A grounded cross upon a rectangle — isn't that a nice design? A number of Chinese characters started life as pictures. In this one, the rectangle depicts an open mouth. The cross is a cow, the curvy line thereleft being a horn; and the whole thing signifies a cow warning of an intruder. Warn, inform, tell, report.
I love these graphic little stories. Some may be mere etymythology. But they are fun. The character for "trouble", T. K. Ann's book Cracking the Chinese Puzzles says, began as an open hand next to a tiger. The open hand lets free a tiger into the countryside. Now that's trouble! Nowadays, it would be an open hand letting free a virus down the Net.
Here's my favourite. These two are "child" and the first character of the word "learn":
But wish as I might, I'm not
e-selling Terracotta Horse
replicas in Xi'an; I'm code-checking
the dogfood module in a last-minute pet
requisites Web shop in Luton, a town that exists
to make Milton Keynes look good.
You can't divert your mind
with character stories in English;
and my GP has put me on steroids after a bout
of Naming Exhaustion
brought on by renovating a Fortran
program whose most informative identifier was
sqrik5. So I keep thinking:
why have meaningful names at all?
When manufactured objects like the components
in my TV carry any purpose-designating label, it's
invariably a garble
of alphanumerics such as
EN29F512-70JC NHGMSf 04020. But you
can always look this up in a datasheet,
thereby getting a full spec written in just about any language
you can read,
and the
electronics engineers manage OK, don't they?
Anyway, I'm fed up. I've an acre of code still
to check, and the dog's dinner submodule
keeps printing the Rat 'n Chaffinch Flavour Yummie Sticks as
worming pills, but I've had enough and I'm giving up.
I'm going to take a tip from Salman
Rushdie, be honest about the difficulty of
explaining code, and name all my
functions p2c2e1.
Or p2c2e2.
Or p2c2e3.
Whatever.
Until I run out of functions to name.
Why p2c2e, you ask?
From a handy little word that stands for
Process Too Complicated To Explain.
I first met it in the context
"How the atom can be split using a toaster and a
household drill? Well, I'm afraid that's a p2c2e" while
reading a report of the 1989 Utah press conference on Cold Fusion,
but in fact, it originates in Rushdie's
novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories. But let
him explain:
'Not so fast,' said Haroun, whose head was spinning, not only at the discovery that there really were Water Genies, that the Great Story Sea wasn't only a story, but also at the revelation that Rashid has quit, given up, buttoned his lip. 'I don't believe you,' he said to the Genie Iff. 'How did he send the message? I've been right with him almost all the time'.
'He sent it by the usual means,' Iff shrugged. 'A P2C2E.'
'And what is that?'
'Obvious,' said the Water Genie with a wicked grin. 'It's a Process Too Complicated To Explain.' Then he saw how upset Haroun was, and added: 'In this case, it involves Thought Beams. We tune in and listen to his thoughts. It's an advanced technology.'
Haroun has travelled to Earth's invisible second moon Kahani on a quest to undo damage done to the Great Story Sea by evil Khattam-Shud. Thus he will restore his father Rashid's ability to tell stories. Without this, Rashid can't continue his job as the greatest story-teller of them all, the Ocean of Notions, the Shah of Blah. And soon after learning the existence of P2C2Es, Haroun discovers where they all originate:
'Orders,' said Iff. All queries to be taken up with the Grand Comptroller.'P2C2E House, I imagine as a cross between Kafka's Castle and Microsoft Corporation Headquarters, office muzak softly playing "they are the eggmen. I am the walrus" while Eggheads sit coding. But I can't help wondering: if these processes are Too Complicated To Explain, how on Earth do the Eggheads explain them to each other? My best guess is that they wrap up all their inexplicable concepts in the ultra-compact language Douglas Adams invented where "Ix" means "boy who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven". Now that's what I want to write my identifiers in!
'Grand Comptroller of what?' Haroun wanted to know.
'Of the Processes Too Complicated To Explain, of course. At P2C2E House, Gup City, Kahani. All letters to be addressed to the Walrus.'
'Who's the Walrus?'
'You don't concentrate, do you?' Iff replied? 'At P2C2E House in Gup City there are many brilliant persons employed, but there is only one Grand Comptroller. They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.'
Of course, like all successful words, P2C2E has its offshoots and descendants. These include:
But I must stop — it's time to heed Michael
Covington's advice. In
Some
Coding Guidelines for Prolog,
he cautions: though programmers once
found it fashionable to
abbreviate "to" as "2", thereby
saving one vital character in names
such as exe2bin, this is too confusing.
Spelling correctly is hard enough; don't
make those reading your
code remember your creative misspellings too.
And, he says, be warned by one
regrettable program,
which used the names menutwo,
menutoo,
menu2, and (probably
by accident) mneu2. That program
was written by my
(ex-) Web shop developers.