• lemmytellyousomething@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1141·
    20 days ago

    Why are they even named like this?

    When I read code, I want to be able to read it…

    Is this from a time when space was expensive and you wanted to reduce the space of the source files on the devs PC???

    For me (with a native language != english), this made it a lot harder to get into programming in the first place.

    • lukstru@lemmy.world
      87·
      20 days ago

      I recently held a science slam about this topic! It’s a mix of the first computer scientists being mathematicians, who love their abbreviations, and limited screen size, memory and file size. It’s a trend in computing that has been well justified in the past, but has been making it harder for people to work together. And the need to use abbreviations has completely gone with the age of auto completion and language servers.

      • papabobolious@feddit.nu
        1·
        18 days ago

        It’s been really holding me back in learning coding. I felt pretty comfortable at first learning javascript, but as I got further the code was increasingly hard to look back to and understand, to the point I had to spend a lot of time understanding my own code.

        Does it truely matter after the code has been compiled if it has more full words or not?

        • lukstru@lemmy.world
          0·
          18 days ago

          It matters as soon as a requirement change comes in and you have to change something. Writing a dirty ass incomprehensible, but working piece of code is ok, as long as no one touches it again.

          But as soon as code has to be reworked, worked on together by multiple people, or you just want to understand what you did 2 weeks earlier, code readability becomes important.

          I like Uncle Bobs Clean Code (with a grain of salt) for a general idea of what such an approach to make code readable could look like. However, it is controversial and if overdone, can achieve the opposite. I like it as a starting point though.

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
      41·
      19 days ago

      It’s from a time keyboards were so hard that you needed to do push ups on your finger tips if you wanted to endure a 9 to 5 programming job.

    • orangeboats@lemmy.world
      37·
      19 days ago

      I recall reading somewhere the earlier compilers had a hard limit on the length of function names, due to memory constraints.

    • sandalbucket@lemmy.world
      223·
      19 days ago

      Did you know that in the first version of php, each function name would be hashed to lookup the code to run it? And the hashing algorithm was: the first letter. So all the functions started with a different letter.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
          18·
          19 days ago

          It’s not. PHP used to use the function length as hash buckets, so by having evenly distributed lengths the execution time was faster. No idea where GP came up with that.

          • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            18 days ago

            GP specifically talked about the first version of PHP, sounds like it was just a dummy implementation as they were working on PHP, that then later got replaced with a proper implementation :)

    • uis@lemm.ee
      97·
      19 days ago

      strncpy becomes stringnumbercopy. You can see why short version is used.

      • lemmytellyousomething@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        14·
        19 days ago

        And with a bit of namespacing and/or object orientation and usage of dots, it becomes perfectly readable.

        There are also camel case and underscores in other languages…

        BTW: How on earth should a newcomer know that the letter “n” in that word stands for number without having to google it? The newcomer could even assume that it’s a letter of the word string… And even, if you know that it stands for number, it’s still hard for me to understand what it means in this context… I actually had to google it… But that’s probably some C++ convention I don’t know about, because I don’t program in C++…

        • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
          5·
          19 days ago

          C is a little older than namespacing and object orientation. C++ wasn’t even a glimmer in Bjarne’s eye when these conventions were laid down.

          And yes, having to google it is part of the design. Originally C programmers would have had to read actual manuals about this stuff. Once you learn the names you don’t really forget so it works well enough even now for ubiquitous standard library functions.

          And yet, C was an ergonomic revelation to programmers of the time. Now it’s the arcane grandpa that most youngsters don’t put up with.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
          63·
          19 days ago

          How on earth should a newcomer know that the letter “n” in that word stands for number without having to google it?

          By looking at the difference between strcpy and strncpy. Preferably, though, you should simply learn C before writing C.

          The gist of is is that strcpy takes a null-terminated string and copies it somewhere, while strncpy takes a zero-terminated string and copies it somewhere but will not write more than n bytes. strncpy literally has exactly one more parameter than strcpy, that being n, hence the name. If n is smaller than the string length (as in: distance to first null byte) then you’re bound to have garbage in your destination, and to check for that you have to dereference the pointer strncpy returns and check if it’s actually null. Yay C error handling.

          In retrospect null-terminated strings were a mistake, but so were many other things, at some point you just have to accept that there’s hysterical raisins everywhere.

          • uis@lemm.ee
            2·
            19 days ago

            If n is smaller than the string length (as in: distance to first null byte) then you’re bound to have garbage in your return destination

            Wha? N is just maximum length of string to copy. Data after dst+n is unchanged.

            In retrospect null-terminated strings were a mistake, but so were many other things, at some point you just have to accept that there’s hysterical raisins everywhere.

            All hail length-prefixed strings!

            • barsoap@lemm.ee
              2·
              19 days ago

              Data after dst+n is unchanged.

              Sure but that means the part before that is garbage because you have a null terminated string without terminator.

              Or at least that’s how I see it. If your intention isn’t to start and end with a null-terminated string you should be using memcpy. Let us not talk about situations where CHAR_BIT != 8 that’s not POSIX anyway.

              Even better, just avoid doing string manipulation in C.

              • uis@lemm.ee
                1·
                18 days ago

                Let us not talk about situations where CHAR_BIT != 8 that’s not POSIX anyway.

                Yeah, let’s not talk about 20-bit one’s complement ints.

      • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        18 days ago

        Why not just add function overloading to the language and have a function named copy that takes a string and an optional character count?

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
    97·
    19 days ago

    I can’t remember it, but I read one Microsoft blog post (in Vista era?) about how one team at Microsoft would develop some amazing new Windows component. They’d proudly name it AmazingNewService.dll. And then the operating system team would come in and say “that’s all fine and good, but you have to conform to the naming convention.” 8+3 filenames. First two letters probably “MS”, because of reasons. …and 15 years later, people still regularly go “What the fuck is MSAMNSVC.DLL?”

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
      41·
      18 days ago

      Why are they still so hung up on 8.3 long after Win95?

      I get not wanting to have spaces in a filename. Those suck.

      Is there something low-level that still doesn’t like long filenames?

      • umbraroze@lemmy.world
        3·
        18 days ago

        Well this was Vista era, they were probably doing that to ensure some sort of expectation from particularly tricky legacy apps. Windows prefers not to break old apps if at all possible.

      • umbraroze@lemmy.world
        3·
        18 days ago

        Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).

        This was so long ago that I unfortunately don’t remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.

  • davidagain@lemmy.world
    59·
    20 days ago

    Rhowch, cwtch, mwyn have to be Welsh. Classicly Welsh sounding words, and mbrsrtowcs, strxfrm can’t possibly be Welsh. Source: my welsh uncle taught me to pronounce Welsh place names.

    Wcstold, wcsoll wmffre could be either but sound really weird as Welsh to me.

      • BakerBagel@midwest.social
        252·
        20 days ago

        I love the Welsh, but holy shit that’s not what those letters are supposed to be for. They and the Irish just made a bunch of shit up when they started to standardize spelling. It makes me understand how Russians feel when Westerners use Cyrillic letters improperly.

        • grozzle@lemm.ee
          25·
          19 days ago

          the letters are “supposed to be” for Latin, a language with only five different vowel sounds.

          everyone since has just been making a bunch of shit up.

          • BakerBagel@midwest.social
            2·
            19 days ago

            I get that, and i also understand that English shifted it’s vowels compared to similar languages. But aside from French, my American brain can kinda figure out how to pronounce Germanic and Romance languages, whereas languages such as Welsh and Polish seems to have applied completely different rules to the Latin alphabet than everyone else.

            • lad@programming.devEnglish
              3·
              18 days ago

              So, you’ve got no issues with “g” being sometimes kinda “h”, “j” being same kind of “h” always, “h” not being a sound a all, “d” sounding like “th”, and “z” sounding like “th” but another “th”, not the one for “d”. Oh, and “c” sounding either like “k” or like the latter “th”

              I know some people that claim that everyone should use Latin alphabet, because you then know what things sound like, but that is the most bullshit take I ever heard. I guess that knowing how to write letters helps, but it looks like every other language pronounces those letters different, and English makes extra effort to pronounce different even the same things

            • shneancy@lemmy.world
              3·
              18 days ago

              at least welsh and polish actually read the letters that we write down, unlike some languages

          • Serpent@feddit.ukEnglish
            8·
            19 days ago

            It’s easy. W is a vowel in Welsh. It sounds similar to ö in German and it can be modified as ŵ to elongate the sound such as in the word dŵr which means water.

            Wrwgwai or Wcrain (for example) are the natural way to spell those countries using the Welsh alphabet. Its a highly phonetic language believe it or not.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    202·
    20 days ago

    I prefer names like these to names that are common words. Even the name of the language is annoying because the letter C isn’t exactly uncommon in other contexts. I can’t blame the people who named the language because they did it long before search engines were a thing, but what excuse do people now have?