programming – WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014!

Are you a programmer? Do you have a hard time reading super_long_variable_names_like_this? Replace them with emoji for quick at-a-glance readability of source code! Become the mythical “10x engineer” thanks to this new programming idea.

Background: Many programming languages allow extremely long user-defined variable and function names. Frequently, companies will have a specific policy on naming: for example, forbidding abbreviations and requiring descriptive variable names (e.g., “CALCULATE_TOTAL_COMPOUND_INTEREST” would be OK, but “COMPINT” or “CCI” would not). The Issue: Normally, this makes sense: if someone has to read a bunch of…

Solve an issue that has bedeviled programmers for over 50 years: move code comments OUT of the main body of the code and INTO the margins. Long code comments can be footnotes!

May 30, 2022

Computers, Design, UI / UX

code comments, code endnotes, code footnotes, endnotes, hide comments, marginalia, programming

Background: Programmers frequently write human-readable comments (which are ignored by the computer) to describe certain regions of code (Figure 1). The Issue: One might, naively, expect that these comments would be separated from the main code in some fashion that would make them easy to consult (or ignore), as desired. This is how books have…

How to destroy a programming language (or natural language?) that you don’t like in one easy step with three difficult sub-steps

Nov 3, 2014

Culture

destroy, esperanto, Language, perl, programming, python

The issue: Sometimes, you don’t like a programming language (like Perl or Python), or a natural language (like English or Spanish). You might have your reasons, or maybe not—maybe you just want to destroy it completely for no reason at all! Proposal: Here’s a simple way to go about wreaking destruction on the language…