How variable naming can significantly impact your teams productivity
What does kunnr mean? Anybody? If you’ve worked with SAP than you might know but to everyone else good luck. What about rqnb? Does it mean anything to you? Isn’t it obvious to you that rqnb represents a request number? Seriously though, why do people name their variables so cryptically?
Think about it a little, how much easier would the code be if the variable was named requestNumber instead of rqnb? And for those of you who think it will save a few keystrokes, hence make your typing faster, remember that each time you use the variable you have to remember how to abbreviate it. With one variable it’s not so bad, but when you have dozens, you’re always looking up the different variable names.
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I think kunnr is german ( Kundennummer ) and mean customer ID or customer number.
Hackfrag
August 15, 2008 at 3:15 pm
You are right. It’s an acronym used by SAP, a German company.
Federico
August 15, 2008 at 3:49 pm
[...] Naming variables – Choosing the name for programming variables is always a tricky one. This post hopes outlines the case for more verbose naming of variables [...]
Rawkes Weekly
August 17, 2008 at 3:04 pm