I have a somewhat related real world story. I had a client that was convinced that tons of people were going to decompile their application and sell their own version of the program, so they insisted that they needed their code obfuscated to protect company secrets and make it harder to reverse engineer. I tried explaining to them that obfuscation wasn’t that big of a deterrent to someone attempting to steal code through reverse engineering and that it would likely cause some issues with debugging, but they were certain they needed it. Sure enough, they then had a real user run into an issue and were surprised to find that their custom logging system was close to useless because the application was outputting random obfuscated letters instead of function and variable names. We did have mapping files, but it took a lot of time to map each log message to make it readable enough to try to understand the user’s issue.
It was obfuscated only in the release build. The issue is that they have a system to send certain logs to an API so they can refer to them if a user has an issue that needs further investigation. Unfortunately, their target audience is not very tech literate and have a hard time explaining how they got into a situation where they experienced a bug, so the remote logging was a way to allow us to try to retrace the user’s steps. Some of the logs that get sent to the API have JSON values converted from class data, will refer directly to class names, etc, and those logs had the obfuscated names.
I was learning python as a wee scientist in training, and my variables were beyond dreadful. I tried naming a list “list” and the interpreter told me I couldn’t, so I opted for “listy”. When I needed to name a new list but listy was taken, I’d often resort to “listyy”.
Scientists who work with computers without having much (if any) targeted training on how to code can write the most horrendous programs.
You should hear of the method of pretending you’re at breakfast or some other anthropomorphized situation, where you name things as butter and cheese, knife and bread, tea and teapot
Then there’s Hungarian notation which is actually used seriously. But I can’t give an entertaining example only s boring and probably inaccurate one.
So don’t use it in non-KRY-definite AA situations, or you could get erroneous results. QQX is fine though, as long as you have non-vanishing ABCD. /s
I wonder if Lean proofs become the new peer review like I’ve heard suggested, if mathematics might break from this, and look more compsci-ish in the future. That way non-specialists could get up to speed quickly.
Variable names should be “self defining” meaning you should be able to understand what its doing from the name. The name also shouldn’t be too long. Combining those together makes it difficult to come up with an “elegant” name
The most atrocious variable names I ever encountered in code were as a research assistant for a math professor doing game theory simulations. Literally unreadable unless you had a copy of his paper on the subject to refer to
in the linux community it’s really common to have applications like MPD, music player daemon, or MPC, music player client, and ncmpc, ncurses music player client, and ncmpcpp the aforementioned one with ++ tacked onto the end.
Cmus, which from what i can recall is literally “c music player”
My first thought was, “Have you talked to the Fallout modding community?” They’re huge masochists and love being shit on, even though they create such amazing things and deserve nothing but praise and monetary rewards…
I accidentally typed “git gud” one time and Steam notified that I have completed all achievements of Dark Souls 1-3 at the same time (I don’t even own the games)
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