Comments on: How Variable Naming Can Significantly Impact Your Teams Productivity

By: Steph

Steph — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:00:55 +0000

Hi Ben,

The book Code Complete 2, chapter 11 specifically (The Power of Variable Names). In it the author has some hard data (research study results) that he shares that supports the same advice as this article

By: ben

ben — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:18:14 +0000

* speed benchmarks
* time to write

By: ben

ben — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:15:17 +0000

> Fully qualified names

You know what would be great is to see some benchmarks on using longer fully qualified var-names versus short guys. I for one love fully qualified names, and IDEs with auto-complete and snippet/macros like Textmate, Zend, et al make it easy to type and re-type variables and function names so “type to write” should be less of a factor.

By: Steph

Steph — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:00:33 +0000

And thanks everyone for the great comments!

Fully qualified names are slowly starting to become more and more the “way” to code. I can’t wait until it’s the standard!

By: Steph

Steph — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:58:24 +0000

Hi Izkata,

Yes, ReqNum is much more obvious, but I’m going to say it’s still not enough. And here’s why:

1. What if you have 10 other variables, all abbr. Are you going to remember what they all mean? You’ll still have to keep looking them up. If you don’t believe me, as someone to pick for you a random chunk of open source code and do a string find/replace on all the variables within a decent method (it has to be code you’ve never seen). Easier, but it still requires more effort than it should.

2. Again, do the same, ask someone to set up some sample code for you. Now try to add some code. When you type in the variables, are you able to remember the exact characters in each or do you have to look up what the abbreviations are each time? Could it be ReqNum, ReqNb, RqNum, RequestNum, ReqNo, etc. There’s just so many rules to abbr. that you need to look it up. With fully qualified names, it’s always the full spelling

By: Izkata

Izkata — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:47:06 +0000

Even a simple “ReqNum” is far more obvious for one of your first examples, and still retains a lot of space.

By: Scott Kane

Scott Kane — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:35:03 +0000

Nice article, Steph. I’ve been arguing this for years. Glad to hear there are others who can see it too. It gets even more complex with function calls etc as well when they are cryptic. One should be able to intuit a call for crying out loud, but so often I’ve seen them structured along the same lines as variables – cryptic as all get out.

By: Owen

Owen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:26:04 +0000

I agree, its not just the case with PHP but most languages. Its so much easier to read words rather than try to decrypt some one else’s acronyms. I try to not use abbreviations but, some times find myself using shortcuts like Dir instead of Directory.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:16:38 +0000

Completely agree. Standards are important, especially when working with a team. I like our team to code in very similar ways so that when we open another’s code it’s like looking at something we ourselves would write. This includes: var naming, denoting scope (_privateVar), organization of variables and methods, commenting properly, # of tabs, and so on.

I’m working on living documents at work right now that define our standards for our development as a whole. Agreed upon folder naming structures for deploying websites, file-naming, deploying via subversion and what-not. What you name things is important and often required (in the case of say working with a framework).

By: Barend

Barend — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:00:32 +0000

I have to agree. For the guys that are worried about the longer time taken in coding, why not just do a Ctrl-H on each of the shortened variable names after you’re happy the code works, just replace the short ones with names that makes sense, and the next person that has to work on the code will be so much more productive.