Conversation

A few years ago I started getting into the habit of always using ${FOO} shell notation. It's a very quick and distinctive visual indication that it's a variable, and helps avoid remembering things like 'in $FOO-BAR, is "FOO" the variable or "FOO-BAR"?'

I do this so often now that I saw someone else's code do $FOO_BAR_LONG_VARIABLE and had a brief moment where I thought "is this PHP code or something?"