Much of the skill in writing unmaintainable code is the art of naming variables and methods. They don’t matter at
all to the compiler. That gives you huge latitude to use them to befuddle the maintenance programmer.
New Uses For Names For Baby
:
Buy a copy of a baby naming book and you’ll
never be at a loss for variable names. Fred is a wonderful name, and easy to type. If you’re looking for easy-to-type
variable names, try adsf or aoeu if you type with a DSK
keyboard.Single Letter Variable Names
: If you call your variables a, b, c, then it will be impossible to search for instances of them using a simple text
editor. Further, nobody will be able to guess what they are for. If anyone even hints at breaking the tradition honoured
since FØRTRAN of using i, j, and k for indexing variables, namely replacing them with ii, jj and kk, warn them
about what the Spanish Inquisition did to heretics.Creative Miss-spelling
: If you must use descriptive variable and function names, misspell them. By misspelling in some function and variable
names, and spelling it correctly in others (such as SetPintleOpening SetPintalClosing) we effectively negate the use of
grep or IDE search techniques. It works amazingly well. Add an international flavor by spelling tory or tori
in different theatres/theaters.Be Abstract
: In naming functions and variables, make heavy use of abstract words like it, everything, data, handle,
stuff, do, routine, perform and the digits e.g. routineX48, PerformDataFunction,
DoIt, HandleStuff and do_args_method.A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.S.
Use acronyms to keep the code terse. Real men never define acronyms; they understand them genetically. If you confuse
even yourself with acronymns, secretly write code using meaningful names, then, when the code in working, use the global
rename feature of Eclipse to give your variables and methods unintelligible names and acronyms, just the way a
mechanical obfuscator would.Thesaurus Surrogatisation
To break the boredom, use a thesaurus to look up as much alternate vocabulary as possible to refer to the same action, e.g.
display, show, present. Vaguely hint there is some subtle difference, where none exists. However,
if there are two similar functions that have a crucial difference, always use the same word in describing both functions
(e.g. print to mean "write to a file", "put ink on paper" and "display on the screen").Eschew the Project Glossary
Under no circumstances, succumb to demands to write a glossary with the special purpose project vocabulary unambiguously
defined. Doing so would be an unprofessional breach of the structured design principle of information hiding. If
you are forced to write such a vocabulary, use recursive definitions such as this one taken from the Ant 1.6.5 manual:
basedir : the absolute path of the project’s basedir (as set with the basedir attribute
of <project>). The reader still has no idea what the basedir is, though he has been given the clue it is
absolute even though all examples show it with . (which, incidentally, is relative).
Wear your adversary down by tantalising, pretending to give information where there is really none. Disguise your
vacuous statements sufficiently so the reader will blame himself for failing to understand.
The reader asks himself, if I am trying to compile the com.mindprod.holidays package, is
basedir C:\, C:\com, C:\com\mindprod or C:\com\mindprod\holidays?
You see why you should never use concrete examples? They are too clear. If you are forced to use them, complain that
they sound childish and unprofessional. Complain that examples make it look as if that is all the product can do.
You want people to appreciate fully very possible variation from the get go. You are not trying to inform, but impress!
After all, no academic would be caught dead giving an example. People only respect that which is too abstract to grasp
easily.
That’s a lot to remember. You will do just fine if all you do when writing documentation is maintain the attitude
that people who don’t already know this jargon are stupid fools who don’t deserve to understand.
Use Plural Forms From Other Languages
A VMS script kept track of the "statii" returned from various "Vaxen". Esperanto,
Klingon and Hobbitese
qualify as languages for these purposes. For pseudo-Esperanto pluraloj, add oj. You will be doing your part toward world
peace.CapiTaliSaTion
Randomly capitalize the first letter of a syllable in the middle of a word. For example: ComputeRasterHistoGram().Reuse Names
Wherever the rules of the language permit, give classes, constructors, methods, member variables, parameters and local
variables the same names. For extra points, reuse local variable names inside {} blocks. The goal is to force the
maintenance programmer to carefully examine the scope of every instance. In particular, in Java,
make ordinary methods masquerade as constructors.Åccented Letters
Use accented characters on variable names. E.g.
typedef struct { int i; } ínt;
where the second ínt’s í is actually i-acute. With only a simple text editor, it’s nearly
impossible to distinguish the slant of the accent mark.Exploit Compiler Name Length Limits
If the compiler will only distinguish the first, say, 8 characters of names, then vary the endings e.g. var_unit_update()
in one case and var_unit_setup() in another. The compiler will treat both as var_unit.Underscore, a Friend Indeed
Use _ and __ as identifiers.Mix Languages
Randomly intersperse two languages (human or computer). If your boss insists you use his language, tell him you can
organise your thoughts better in your own language, or, if that does not work, allege linguistic discrimination and
threaten to sue your employers for a vast sum.Extended ASCII
Extended ASCII characters are perfectly valid as variable names, including ß, Ð, and ñ characters. They
are almost impossible to type without copying/pasting in a simple text editor.Names From Other Languages
Use foreign language dictionaries as a source for variable names. For example, use the German punkt for point.
Maintenance coders, without your firm grasp of German, will enjoy the multicultural experience of deciphering the
meaning.Names From Mathematics
Choose variable names that masquerade as mathematical operators, e.g.:
openParen = ( slash + asterix ) / equals;
Bedazzling Names
Choose variable names with irrelevant emotional connotation. e.g.:
marypoppins = ( superman + starship ) / god;
This confuses the reader because they have difficulty disassociating the emotional connotations of the words from the
logic they’re trying to think about.Rename and Reuse
This trick works especially well in Ada, a language immune to many of the standard obfuscation techniques. The people
who originally named all the objects and packages you use were morons. Rather than try to convince them to change, just
use renames and subtypes to rename everything to names of your own devising. Make sure to leave a few references to the
old names in, as a trap for the unwary.When To Use i
Never use i for the innermost loop variable. Use anything but. Use i
liberally for any other purpose especially for non-int variables. Similarly use n as a loop
index.Conventions Schmentions
Ignore Sun’s coding conventions, after all, Sun
does. Fortunately, the compiler won’t tattle when you violate them. The goal is to come up with names that
differ subtlely only in case. If you are forced to use the capitalisation conventions, you can still subvert wherever
the choice is ambigous, e.g. use both inputFile name
and input file Name. Invent your own hopelessly
complex naming conventions, then berate everyone else for not following them.Lower Case l Looks a Lot Like the Digit 1
Use lower case l to indicate long constants. e.g. 10l is more likely to be mistaken for 101 that 10L is. Ban any fonts
that clearly disambiguate uvw wW gq9 2z 5s il17|!j oO08 `'"
;: ,. m nn rn {[()]}. Be creative.Reuse of Global Names as Private
Declare a global array in module A, and a private one of the same name in the header file for module B, so that it
appears that it’s the global array you are using in module B, but it isn’t. Make no reference in the
comments to this duplication.Recycling Revisited
Use scoping as confusingly as possible by recycling variable names in contradictory ways. For example, suppose you have
global variables A and B, and functions foo and bar. If you know that variable A will be regularly passed to foo and B
to bar, make sure to define the functions as function foo(B) and function bar(A) so that inside the functions A will
always be referred to as B and vice versa. With more functions and globals, you can create vast confusing webs of
mutually contradictory uses of the same names.Recycle Your Variables
Wherever scope rules permit, reuse existing unrelated variable names. Similarly, use the same temporary variable for two
unrelated purposes (purporting to save stack slots). For a fiendish variant, morph the variable, for example, assign a
value to a variable at the top of a very long method, and then somewhere in the middle, change the meaning of the
variable in a subtle way, such as converting it from a 0-based coordinate to a 1-based coordinate. Be certain not to
document this change in meaning.Cd wrttn wtht vwls s mch trsr
When using abbreviations inside variable or method names, break the boredom with several variants for the same word, and
even spell it out longhand once in while. This helps defeat those lazy bums who use text search to understand only some
aspect of your program. Consider variant spellings as a variant on the ploy, e.g. mixing International colour,
with American color and dude-speak kulerz. If you spell out names in full, there is only one possible way
to spell each name. These are too easy for the maintenance programmer to remember. Because there are so many different
ways to abbreviate a word, with abbreviations, you can have several different variables that all have the same apparent
purpose. As an added bonus, the maintenance programmer might not even notice they are separate variables.Misleading names
Make sure that every method does a little bit more (or less) than its name suggests. As a simple example, a method named isValid(x)
should as a side effect convert x to binary and store the result in a database.m_
a naming convention from the world of C++ is the use of "m_" in front of members. This is supposed to help you
tell them apart from methods, so long as you forget that "method" also starts with the letter "m".o_apple obj_apple
Use an "o" or "obj" prefix for each instance of the class to show that you’re thinking of the
big, polymorphic picture.Hungarian Notation
Hungarian Notation is the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques; use it! Due to the sheer volume
of source code contaminated by this idiom nothing can kill a maintenance engineer faster than a well planned Hungarian
Notation attack. The following tips will help you corrupt the original intent of Hungarian Notation:
- Insist on using "c" for const in C++ and other languages that directly enforce the const-ness of a variable.
- Seek out and use Hungarian warts that have meaning in languages other than your current language. For example insist on
the PowerBuilder "l_" and "a_ " {local and argument} scoping prefixes and always use the VB-esque
style of having a Hungarian wart for every control type when coding to C++. Try to stay ignorant of the fact that megs
of plainly visible MFC source code does not use Hungarian warts for control types.
- Always violate the Hungarian principle that the most commonly used variables should carry the least extra information
around with them. Achieve this end through the techniques outlined above and by insisting that each class type have a
custom wart prefix. Never allow anyone to remind you that no wart tells you that something is a class. The
importance of this rule cannot be overstated: if you fail to adhere to its principles the source code may become flooded
with shorter variable names that have a higher vowel/consonant ratio. In the worst case scenario this can lead to a full
collapse of obfuscation and the spontaneous reappearance of English Notation in code!
- Flagrantly violate the Hungarian-esque concept that function parameters and other high visibility symbols must be given
meaningful names, but that Hungarian type warts all by themselves make excellent temporary variable names.
- Insist on carrying outright orthogonal information in your Hungarian warts. Consider this real world example: "a_crszkvc30LastNameCol".
It took a team of maintenance engineers nearly 3 days to figure out that this whopper variable
name described a const, reference, function argument that was holding information from a database column of type Varchar[30]
named "LastName" which was part of the table’s primary key. When properly combined with the principle
that "all variables should be public" this technique has the power to render thousands of lines of source code
obsolete instantly!
- Use to your advantage the principle that the human brain can only hold 7 pieces of information concurrently. For example
code written to the above standard has the following properties:
- a single assignment statement carries 14 pieces of type and name information.
- a single function call that passes three parameters and assigns a result carries 29 pieces of type and name information.
- Seek to improve this excellent, but far too concise, standard. Impress management and coworkers by recommending a 5
letter day of the week prefix to help isolate code written on 'Monam' and 'FriPM'.
- It is easy to overwhelm the short term memory with even a moderately complex nesting structure, especially when
the maintenance programmer can’t see the start and end of each block on screen simultaneously.
Hungarian Notation Revisited
One followon trick in the Hungarian notation is "change the type of a variable but leave the variable name
unchanged". This is almost invariably done in windows apps with the migration from Win16 :- WndProc(HWND hW, WORD
wMsg, WORD wParam, LONG lParam) to Win32 WndProc(HWND hW, UINT wMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) where the w values
hint that they are words, but they really refer to longs. The real value of this approach comes clear with the Win64
migration, when the parameters will be 64 bits wide, but the old "w" and "l" prefixes will remain
forever.Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
If you have to define a structure to hold data for callbacks, always call the structure PRIVDATA. Every module can
define it’s own PRIVDATA. In VC++, this has the advantage of confusing the debugger so that if you have a PRIVDATA
variable and try to expand it in the watch window, it doesn’t know which PRIVDATA you mean, so it just picks one.Obscure film references
Use constant names like LancelotsFavouriteColour instead of blue and
assign it hex value of 0x0204FB. The color looks identical to pure blue on the screen, and a maintenance programmer
would have to work out 0204FB (or use some graphic tool) to know what it looks like. Only someone intimately familiar
with Monty Python and the Holy Grail would know that Lancelot’s favorite color was blue. If a maintenance
programmer can’t quote entire Monty Python movies from memory, he or she has no business being a programmer.Fun With Colours
It goes without saying you should use numeric colour literals rather than named constants. Unfortunately, most skilled
maintenance engineers will have learnt by now that hex coded colour values are easy to decode. E.g. 0x0204FB
is
Red = 02
Green = 04
Blue = FB
Which is clearly pretty much entirely blue.
You want is to use the decimal value, 132347. There’s no way without the aid
of paper or a calculator that any normal person could convert that into the colour 'blue'. For extra bonus points you
can produce a decimal colour that looks like it’s expressed as hex, for example 808000.
A quick glance would guess half red + half green = darkish yellow, but in fact it’s not hex, the real colour is 0xc5440
(a dark cyan).
The Netscape colours are all carefully named. For example papayawhip is 0xffefd5.
Just to keep them on their toes, define a papayawhip colour constant as 0xff00ff, a garish
magenta. Have fun making up obscure colour names like algae = 0x556b2f instead of
darkolivegreen. Very few people know what colour puce and teal are, but would never admit it. Exploit that.
You can even lay a trap for a programmer who comes after you to do the dirty deed. Use accurately-named but hideous
colours. If the follow-up programer is lazy, he will change the colour definitions to something sane, but will leave
your original colour names.
by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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