Greppability is an underrated code metric
Greppability is an underrated code metric
Keeping your codebase searchable will make your maintenance life easier in the long run
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Very good points. A codebase that gets this VERY wrong is Gitlab. I think it might be a dumb characteristic of Ruby programs, but they generate identifiers all over the place. I once had to literally give up following some code because I could not find what it was calling anywhere. Insanity.
Another point: don't use
-in names. Eventually you'll have to write them down in a programming language, at which point you have to change the name. CSS made this mistake.foo-barin CSS maps tofooBarin Javascript. Rust also made this mistake with crate names. A crate calledfoo-barmagically becomesfoo_barin Rust code.I've been working in Ruby on Rails lately (unfortunately) and yeah it's extremely bad at this. There's so much hidden implicit behavior everywhere.
The dash
-vs underscore_is also a common "problem" with CLI arguments--file-name, that are mapped to variable namesfile_name.Yeah, translating between cases isn't exactly a problem IME. Might be neat to have a case-aware grep though, so you can get kebab-case, snake_case, camelCase and PascalCase all done in one go.