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Hot take: I spent 6 months naming every variable things like "data2" and "tempFinal"
I was building a little score tracker in Python for my board game group and had maybe 40 variables with names like "x", "temp", and "data3". Last month my friend priya looked at my screen for 10 seconds and asked what "tempFinal2" actually held, and I honestly could not remember. I had been re-reading my own code for 20 minutes trying to find a bug that turned out to be a typo in one of five variables all called "count". So I renamed everything to stuff like "player_score" and "round_number" and the bug basically jumped out at me in two minutes. Turns out my problem was never the logic, it was that I was writing notes to a stranger instead of to myself. What naming habit finally clicked for you, or are you still out here with a folder full of "test1".py?
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knight.oscar1d ago
My favorite is when you come back to code two weeks later and find "temp" and "temp2" and you're sitting there like a detective trying to figure out which temp is the real temp. I once had a variable called "finalCount" and then "finalCountActual" and then, God help me, "finalCountActualReal." The rename to player_score and round_number hits different because suddenly the code reads like a sentence instead of a ransom note. Honestly "test1.py" is a warning sign that you've already given up on future you as a person.
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