Another marathon day at Tech*Ed. More interesting questions and answers. One thing in particular struck me during the day, though.
Another MVP was helping a customer repair a broken update server install. He read off a URL, and when he got to a /
character, he said whack
. I was always under the impression that whack
meant \
, and was created to help disambiguate the slash (/
) from the backslash (\
). But now it seems that people are using it to mean either character, which only creates more ambiguity.
I did the same thing last week with a new acquaintance’s name. I somehow got it into my head that his name was Jeff, when in fact it is Josh. The problem now is that I have two equally valid (to me) names for this person, so I’m doomed to tons of mental energy to prevent calling him by the wrong name.
Two alternatives is the worst case for me. I seem to be able to disambiguate 3+ similar objects easily enough, but pairs are killers for me.
This applies to programming, believe it or not. The same poorly-wired part of my brain that confuses the names of slashes and of people also confuses the names of variables in my code. The solution is easy: I have a fairly rigid naming scheme that I try to stick to when I code. That way, I can remember names. The downside is that it tends to generate fairly long variable names, but the upside is that I don’t have to constantly hit page-up to see what I called some particular mutex.
Plus, if you name your entities in a consistent manner, it makes debugging and code review a lot easier. Wrong things tend to stick out as being wrong. On the other hand, please do NOT confuse this as an argument for Hungarian notation (as commonly understood).
Anyway, if you’re at Tech*Ed, come by and say hi tomorrow afternoon – I’ll be in the Windows Client area of the TLC from 12:30 until 5:30 or so. I’m back for most of the afternoon tomorrow and again on Thursday, and am flying home Thursday night. Not a lot of driver-related questions so far…