Developing a nose for smelly code.
May 11th, 2005
A couple of months ago (as noted here), Joel (he who is On Software) professed his love for Hungarian notation—variable naming with little bits of metadata baked right into the crust. Tasty.
Today he returns to old Magyarország with a new article: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong. In it he details the cargo-cult mentality of the generations who have perverted the original H-notation idea since its invention:
In Simonyi’s version of Hungarian notation, every variable was prefixed with a lower case tag that indicated the kind of thing that the variable contained.
rwMaxprefixI’m using the word kind on purpose, there, because Simonyi mistakenly used the word type in his paper, and generations of programmers misunderstood what he meant.