[FRIAM] What's in a name? MOTH to a Flame

[Barry MacKichan]

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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