> we use the identifier p to represent a value in the people slice — the range block is so small and tight that using a single letter name is clear enough.<p>No, it's not. When you see `p.Age`, you have to go back and find the body of the loop, see what it operates on and decipher what p stands for. When you see `person.Age`, you understand it. I've never understood what is gained by using `p` instead of spelling it out as `person`.
Long lines make reading rhythm uncomfortable (long jumps, prolonged eye movements) and long words make the text too dense and slow down the reading. It’s bad typography.<p>I have heard an idea that a good variable should be understood by just reading its name, out of context. That would make “ProductIndex” superior to “i”, which doesn't add any clarity.
I've felt strongly for a while now that abbreviations should be "lossless" in order to be useful; it should be unambiguous now get back to the unabbreviated form. For whatever reason, people seem to love trying to optimize for character count with abbreviations that actually make things more confusing (like `res` in a context where it might mean either "response" or "result).<p>I just don't get the obsession with terseness when we have modern tooling. I don't type particularly fast, but autocomplete makes it pretty quick for me to type out even longer names, and any decent formatter will split up long lines automatically in a way that's usually sane (and in my experience, the times when it's annoying are usually due to something like a function with way too many arguments or people not wanting to put a subexpression in a separate variable because I guess they don't know that the compiler will just inline it) rather than the names being a few characters too many.<p>Meanwhile, pretty much everywhere I've worked has had at least some concerns about code reviews either already being or potentially becoming a burden on the team due to the amount of time and effort it takes to read through someone else's code. I feel like more emphasis on making code readable rather than just functional and quick to write would be a sensible thing to consider, but somehow it never seems to be part of the discussion.
I agree with this comment so much.<p>Tried to use the new slices package or comparables? It's a nightmare to debug, for no reason whatsoever. If they would've used interface names like Slice or Comparable or Stringable or something, it would have been so much easier.<p>The naming conventions are something that really fucks up my coding workflow, and it can be avoided 100% of the time if they would stop with those stupid variable names. I am not a machine, and there is no reason to make code intentionally unreadable.
I was surprised to see literally invalid names in the "bad" section, e.g. "Cannot start with a digit". Why even presenting this if it's rejected by the compiler?
I like this article — short, accurate (which is somehow not a given these days...) and useful, just like Go language itself.
this seems anachronistic, written for a human artisan laboring over each naming choice directly<p>a modern approach would be a condensed ruleset passed to the ai model for the code it generates, and it should be straightforward to substitute different rulesets if you have a different taste in parochialisms.
> this seems anachronistic, written for a human artisan laboring over each naming choice directly<p>Some of us want to write well thought-through code, rather than letting an AI just spew poorly thought-through unmaintainable shit.
You can use this article to guide your choice of rulesets. And you still have to exert some artisan labor to develop any taste.<p>Parochialism here is saying “just use AI” in disguise.
You're making yourself redundant if you don't keep your actual programming skills sharp.
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Another of mine: don't name a struct after an interface method that it's supposed to implement. If you have a package linearalgebra, then making a custom error type linearalgebra.LinearAlgebraError is too "chatty" but linearalgebra.Error will cause you pain if it implements "Error string()", as it probably should, and you decide to make a linearalgebra.MatrixSingularError that wraps a linearalgebra.Error to "inherit" its methods.<p>In the end, it ended up called linearalgebra.Err .<p>P.S Alex Edwards' "let's go" and "let's go further" are great books to get someone up to date with golang, just keep an eye on features that are newer than the book(s).