My name is Variable.

The subject of variable naming came up on the KinoSearch mailing list a little while back. This blog entry started off as part of an email reply to that thread, but then I thought better of it...

As a base, I agree with all the general rules regarding names laid out in the Slash Style Guide:

• Only iterators get single-letter names.
• Scalars are singular.
• Composite variables — e.g. arrays and hashes — are plural.
• References to compound variables are also plural.
• Constants get all caps.
• Underscore separation rather than CamelCase.
• Names should be descriptive — e.g. "$story_count" is preferable to "$sc" (to quote the Slash example).

The only qualification I would make is that the preference for underscores over CamelCase is language-dependent — for instance, CamelCase is preferable for Java and JavaScript.

On top of those, here are a few more:

• Names should be pronounceable. If I'd written the C standard library (heh), "strcmp" would be "scomp". Pronounceable variable names are easier for the eye to parse — they look like words, so we absorb them as whole words rather than collections of distinct, individual letters.
• Avoid overload overload. It's generally accepted that generic names like "data" and "var" should be avoided because they are unclear. However, names which may be sufficiently specific in certain contexts may be ambiguous in others. The word "index", for example, is horrendously overloaded in the context of searching. Does it refer to an existing inverted index on the file system? The act of indexing? Or an array index? Solution: never use "index" as a variable name.
• Class names should always be singular, so that individual instances can follow the scalar naming pattern and composites can follow the composite naming pattern. Say you had a class called "Taxes". What do you name an array of objects belonging to the Taxes class? "taxeses"?
• The shortest unambiguous name should be used, because longer names yield more multi-line statements. Perhaps I take this farther than most, using "cat" for "category" and "nick" for "nickname" when others might use the full form.

Each of these rules is made to be broken, of course... but collectively, they seem to have served me well.

This blogging software's too little! This one's too big!

Blosxom: a few hundred lines of Perl.

Angerwhale: when I tried to install it from CPAN, it asked me if I wanted to install its forty dependecies. Forty! And I already had Catalyst installed!

How about something functional in between those two extremes, please?

Comment 22

So... after some undisclosed amount of time screwing around with various comment plugins, I'm dissatisfied. I don't feel an affinity with the Blosxom plugin architecture.

None of the available plugins seem to do what I want. Some of them are close, but not close enough, and they aren't like quite Perl modules. If they were CPAN distros, I would know exactly how to extend, test, and debug them. Since they're ad hoc files, it's less clear, and the code quality seems to be lower on average than you'd see on CPAN. They might be easier for the less skilled hacker to prepare, but they're more troublesome for me to work on.

I glanced at Bryar, and it looks more like what I'm used to -- but not many people seem to have hacked on it. Movable Type, maybe?

I'd ask y'all out there for advice... but first I'll need to turn on comments.

Once more time from the top.

Two posts in a year and a half! I knew I was never going to be the world's most prolific blogger, but... wow.

Let's try this one more time from the top.

Perl on Rails

"People ask me, 'Why don't you get married?', and I tell them, 'I am married!' They say, 'You are?! When did you get married?', and I say 'I've been married since I was five years old! I'm married to the trains.'" -- somebody I met on the Amtrak Coast Starlight Express

I love the Coast Starlight, especially when it's late -- which it always is. When traveling north, you wake up somewhere in southern Oregon, and the later the train is, the more of that dramatic countryside you get to take in. Last time I was lucky -- the train was over four hours late, and I woke up in northern California!

I just wish the Coast Starlight had more electrical outlets.

overload overload

Searchable is an interface in Java Lucene's org.apache.lucene.search package. It defines six different methods called search().

Searcher is an abstract class which implements the Searchable interface. It defines eight more methods called search().

The IndexSearcher class subclasses Searcher, so it inherits all eight of Searcher's search() methods. It also implements three of the search() methods defined by Searchable. Then there's the aptly named MultiSearcher, which, like IndexSearcher, inherits from Searcher and implements three search() methods of its own.

I wonder what it would take to rewrite all of Lucene using only methods called overload().