 Hungarian notation - deux
Tuesday, 1 November 2005
It doesn’t happen all that often but when it does, it’s worth the wait.
You see, I’m one of those insubordinate software developers who has for many years insisted that Hungarian notation is crap because not even Hungarians find it useful. I was one of the obnoxiously vocal minority who just refused to conform to variable naming conventions, Microsoft-style.
If you’re not a programmer: Hungarian notation is the practise of prefixing variable names with variable type indicators, in at attempt to make it easy for the programmer to instantly know what type of data she’s dealing with. Is it an integer, string, date, object, currency, etc?
I have always argued that if you knew how to use the IDE and gave your variables meaningful, common sense and semantic names, there’s no need for the stupidity and ugliness of Hungarian. Most “professional” programmers I know disagreed with me. Most books and articles on Visual Basic and C++ (Windows) disagreed with me. Microsoft’s own programmers obviously disagreed with me.
But things have changed.
And they’ve turned right around. Microsoft no longer recommends Hungarian.
Finally.
It doesn’t happen all that often but when it does, it’s worth the wait. It feels good to say, on behalf of the obnoxiously vocal minority:
“I told you so.”
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