On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 4:57 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: Okay, this is driving me crazy. Can I vent?
Archive me if you've heard this before: Many years ago (like 12 or 18 years ago), David Blocker and I competed in a Data Based Advisor magazine RAD competition, using R:BASE. We had never programmed together on a project before we arrived in Atlanta for the contest. When the bell rang in the morning, we tore open the specifications, divided up the work, and started programming. It was a Habitat for Humanity volunteer-tracking database application. It turned out, David liked very short variable names, 2 or 4 characters, because he could type them faster, and was less likely to spell them wrong. (vA, vB, vC, vD) I tended to use all 18 characters available, partly because I can type fast, and partly because I get confused so easily. (vNextValueInLoop, vExitValueForLoop, vDefaultVolunteerHrs) He was as upset with my code as I was with his. (And neither of us was quite as bad as those examples.) Needless to say, our lack of a standard worked against us. When the finishing gun sounded and we had to hand the floppy disk to the judge, we had a great implementation of the spec. Unfortunately, we failed to properly initialize some variable somewhere, and the judges reviewing the app never could link to all the cool stuff we had finished. (We still finished well compared to many many teams, but well out of the money.) Bill
