nHungarian
Todd points out that Joel Spolsky has shown his hand: Fog Creek is a Hungarian shop. (No, not that kind of Hungarian; this kind. I must confess that I use a very light Hungarian in my code, of the m_ and g_ sort. But that’s about it.) So Said Todd:
I shall be very interested to see whether Hungarian notation experiences
a popular revival now that Joel has come out of that closet.I was not aware that there are sects in the religion; certainly the semantic notation Joel describes is marginally less repulsive to me than the typological notation.
(Aside: A certain former employer had a bunch of Hungarianesque voodoo rituals all over the core code; like everything else in the codebase it was a bizarre cargo-cult version of something cribbed from the original Macintosh APIs and programming practices. It was the worst kind of Hungarian notation: instead of any kind of marginally useful semantic information, the random characters prefixed (and suffixed!) to variable names offered a redundant reminder of the declared type of the variable. Well, I guess it was somewhat useful: some functions spanned many hundreds of lines (!), and so it was common to forget the storage class of a variable which was declared several pages ago.)