During the years of my work I've seen many developers, good ones and bad ones. Usually I don't care about the bad ones. But sometimes what these bad ones say is so notably, that it's worth quoting and talking about to see how NOT to develop software. That's what this page is about.
Symbol names are just all empty words.
That's what a developer replied when I complained about the name of a symbol and wanted to suggest a better name.
The quality of the choice of symbol names has great influence on software quality in many ways. Symbols with better names are:
So of course the name of a symbol is NOT just all empty words.
I don't care whether it violates the spec. Look, it works!
Question: Will it still work with the next update?
Let's put this in the context of HTML for now. How often have I seen companies paying huge amounts of money for huge intranet website restructurings just because Microsoft release a new version of IE. People, compared to what you actually write, you'll get into serious trouble with IE 7 or IE 8. If you stick to the standards, you either won't have problems or your problems will get less over time instead of worse.
Or let's look at a C compiler. "But it works." Will it also work with the new version? Will it still work with the other compiler when you have to port it?
Why burden your future with 10 times extra load by lazyness today? Would you otherwise have nothing to do in future? If you're that bad, that's your problem, but then stay away from me and don't turn your problem into my problem!