Oh, I need to post a minor rant just by way of venting a little. No, it’s not about whether Sarah Palin has the time to be a good mom and an interplanetary adventurer. What has got my eyes crossed this afternoon is trying to read and understand code that contains gibberish. Let me explain: when you write code you have to make up names for things all the time. Let’s say you have a quantity that represents the number of people that voted for Joe Biden the last time he ran for president. You need to give this quantity a name so that you can refer to it in code. You could name it BidenVoteCount. Or you could name it BVCNT1A, assuming you were either following a strict policy or stark raving nuts. I can’t say anything about what sort of corporate policy would result in so abjectly horrible a moniker, but I am looking at tons of old code that has “names” like that in it, and I don’t think the original coders were nuts. I don’t know about you, but I just can’t keep crap like that in my L1 cache, try as I might. Every single time I type one I have to peer at it through glazed eyes and nibble off the letters one at a time to see if they taste right. Then I have to do it again, because this is important code. I can tell whether I typed “BidenVoteCount” correctly in about .10 seconds. If you are a young programmer, and someone, someday, tells you that you have to use names like that, you must rebel. It’s your duty.