Comment by Marco Alka on "Does the way you name your functions and variables portray your level of skill or experience in programming?"

In my experience, you can tell the difference between a complete beginner and someone with more experience from names only. Compare the following examples and decide for yourself:

fn sayHello() {
  let mut i = 0;
  let helloText = "Hello World <3";
  while i < 10 {
    println!("{}", helloText);
    i += 1;
  }
}

fn sayHello() {
  let mut counter = 0;
  let textToPrint = "Hello World <3";
  while counter < 10 {
    println!("{}", textToPrint);
    counter += 1;
  }
}

I think you mean while counter < 10 in the second example. Good point, though. Often savings gained by using shorthand or abbreviations are outweighed by the extra time it takes to review your code at a later date.

@gimcrack thank you, I corrected it

Well, wait a second. I'd actually suggest that the top function is the work of a more experienced programmer than the bottom one.

First, using "i" is pretty standard as an iterator; making it more verbose as "counter" doesn't really make that much of a difference, Second, helloText is a much better variable name for textToPrint for this function, because the content of the helloText is "Hello World <3". Now, if you were passing in the text as a parameter to the sayHello function, "textToPrint" is a better variable name (but at that point, you should probably rename the function to "sayText" or "printText".

If I were to write out the function (using ES6) I'd probably write something like this:

const sayText = (textToPrint, times = 1) => 
  Array(times).fill(textToPrint).forEach((text) => console.log(text));

const sayHelloTenTimes = () => sayText("Hello World <3", 10);

Couple of things might make ES6 different from your Rust solution (I've never used Rust) - the "times = 1" declaration in the parameter means that if times is undefined, it will assume the times variable should be 1, but it can be overwritten if defined. That allows you to use sayText("foo") and have it be syntactically valid. Additionally, creating an Array requires more memory than simply iterating; but this function could be rewritten using a standard iterator instead as:

const sayText = (textToPrint, times = 1) => {
   while (times > 0){
     console.log(textToPrint)
     times--;
   }
}

@brianboyko

I'd actually suggest that the top function is the work of a more experienced programmer

Exactly, that was my intention, but I left it open for interpretation. iis more or less the usual name for an iterator and any other developer should be able to identify it as such easily. textToPrint could be considered OK, but what would happen if there were more than one text to print? So helloText specifies what kind of text it is instead of what happens with the content. Especially when the content is used in many contexts, it is better to declare the content instead of an action.

Heh, I intentionally used Rust instead of JS, I only know of very few people here who are able to use it, but it still is very easy to read, as it is quite similar to C, JS and Swift. I also considered using Pascal, but it's quite exotic compared to most commonly used languages.

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