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1. nixCraft 🐧 (nixcraft@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 09:13:08 JST nixCraft 🐧

   Why did you use variables like ‘i’ or ‘j’ in for loop instead of verbose names like “counter”? 👨🏽💻

   • Tertle950 (tertle950@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 09:13:50 JST Tertle950

     in reply to

     @nixCraft my monitor only has so much space dude

   • Will (willa763@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 09:17:47 JST Will

     in reply to

     @nixCraft Depends on how clear that variable is for me to use something like counter.

   • Seth Galitzer (sgsax@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 09:18:09 JST Seth Galitzer

     in reply to

     @nixCraft Remember when we used to write concise and clear code, economizing as much as possible, looking for the most elegant and compact solution? I miss those days.

   • lemgandi (lemgandi@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 09:19:51 JST lemgandi

     in reply to

     @nixCraft Actually I favor "ii" and "jj". Much easier to search for in a text editor.

   • selje 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇳🇴 🇮🇪 (selje@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 09:20:52 JST selje 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇳🇴 🇮🇪

     in reply to

     @nixCraft
     Because many of us started programming in the days of monochrome monitors and no mouse. Similar to why some many standard Unix cli commands are two to three letters, ls, ed, pwd, etc.

   • Tom Lyon ✅ (aka_pugs@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 09:23:15 JST Tom Lyon ✅

     in reply to

     @nixCraft FORTRAN did it first, but it comes straight from math notation for sums (big sigma) and products (big pi). Do people really not realize this?

   • Jonathan M. (hstone32@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 10:17:41 JST Jonathan M.

     in reply to

     @nixCraft because my math classes taught me to identify dimensions as I, j, k, l

   • Epistomai (epistomai@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 13:41:36 JST Epistomai

     in reply to

     @nixCraft, if it's for a quick for, I use them. if it's more complex, or I will need the variable for later, then another more specific

   • expiredtoken (expiredtoken@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 14:33:47 JST expiredtoken

     in reply to

     @nixCraft We had an argument about variable names in loops, and i won. Period.

   • Freevolt (freevolt24@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 17:02:33 JST Freevolt

     in reply to

     @nixCraft because its... verbose

   • Mike Seymour (mikeseymour@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Sep-2024 20:40:34 JST Mike Seymour

     in reply to

     @nixCraft it's a long-standing and well understood convention, adopted from mathematics by the earliest programming languages, and can help keep expressions short and readable. Simply using a longer name like "counter" gives no useful information, but sometimes it's helpful to use a more descriptive name to better specify what you're iterating over. Choosing good names is a difficult and context-sensitive problem.

   • Florian Xaver (wosrediinanatour@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 13-Sep-2024 04:34:07 JST Florian Xaver

     in reply to

     @nixCraft I guess it comes from indices in Mathematics.