I thought this was going to be a bit of dry humor before I followed the link. It’s actually serious, and fairly informative (albeit a bit scary).
The first place I worked had a soft-but-hard rule (enforced by ridicule) that single-letter variable names not be used. Loop counters like i, j, and k were frowned upon. However, counters like ii, jj, and kk were fine for matrix operations, xx and yy for image loops, etc.
There were a couple of key guidelines to follow:
1. If it can have more meaning than sample, pixel, or matrix position, give it more meaning, but two characters repeated is fine for loop counters (again, with meaning).
2. Whatever you use should be quickly findable with text search tools of the era (the late ‘90’s).
Someone shouldn’t have to use source inspection assistive coding tools to parse the code you write. When someone else (or you, in a few months) comes upon this code and needs to understand it, they should be able to use find to do it.
The first place I worked had a soft-but-hard rule (enforced by ridicule) that single-letter variable names not be used. Loop counters like i, j, and k were frowned upon. However, counters like ii, jj, and kk were fine for matrix operations, xx and yy for image loops, etc.
There were a couple of key guidelines to follow:
1. If it can have more meaning than sample, pixel, or matrix position, give it more meaning, but two characters repeated is fine for loop counters (again, with meaning).
2. Whatever you use should be quickly findable with text search tools of the era (the late ‘90’s).
Someone shouldn’t have to use source inspection assistive coding tools to parse the code you write. When someone else (or you, in a few months) comes upon this code and needs to understand it, they should be able to use find to do it.