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.
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.
mathematicians, who love their abbreviations
Man, I hate that so much. I swear this was half the reason I struggled with maths and physics, that these guys need to write this:
Rather than this:
At some point, they even collectively decided that not having to write a multiplication dot is more important than being able to use more than a single letter for your variables. Just what the fuck?
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?
I recall reading somewhere the earlier compilers had a hard limit on the length of function names, due to memory constraints.
I've heard it's because old screens were like 60 character wide
Also punched cards had around 80 columns, which put a hard limit on the number of characters per line.
strncpy becomes stringnumbercopy. You can see why short version is used.
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++.....
Why not just add function overloading to the language and have a function named
copythat takes a string and an optional character count?
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?"
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?
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.
sounds interesting~, any chance that I can find this post?
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.
man -kto the rescue:mbsrtowcs,strxfrmandwcstoldare C functions.wcsoll is a mispronunciation of wcscoll
Oh no. You tell them forbidden knowledge of reading manual.
Who wants to write C functions for the rest with me?
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.
Wmffre is actually the Welsh spelling of the name "Humphrey"
I thought I would be better at this game than I am.
Easy. The ones with vowels are C library functions.
Are there any of them that are both?
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?
So you're saying we should create a programming language called "Welsh" with C-like function names?
No because that would imply that Welsh is not just as valid a language as English and I don't want to be wedi'i gywiro'n gwrtais.
Rhowch, mwyn, and wnffre are Welsh. The rest is nonsense.
What are those in English?
Rhowch = give / enter supply? Kinda? Like "enter password" is where i've seen it.
Mwyn = mine as in dig
Wmffre = welsh version of humphrey and i only know that due to my great-grandfather.
Cwtch is the most obviously Welsh word there.
Obviously.
I'm bad at naming things too🖐️
Yep
