When I interviewed at Microsoft, one of my interviewers was Charles Simonyi, the originator of what is called “Hungarian”. It is a small set of rules and a bunch of prefixes used to encode type information in variable and function names. For example, ‘lpszName’ is the name of a long pointer to a zero-terminated string. It doesn’t work well when there are a lot of user-defined types, such as C++ classes. I was unaware of this before the interview.
The interview included implementing a function on a blackboard. At some point I muttered that the hardest part of programming is coming up with names. I think I became a shoo-in at that point. (I still do believe that about names).
—Barry
On 1 Nov 2020, at 11:59, Stephen Guerin wrote:
Naming may seem trivial and arbitrary but it is important as this [CS aphorism attests](<https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html>).
"There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors."
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