I think critiquing HN on readability is a red herring though. In any environment – be it solo work, a job or an open source project, there are standards for coding. They may be ones you create on the fly or ones you adhere to because your manager says so, but I don’t think a set of prefixes which can be understood in sixty seconds is a good reason to not use HN.

To the contrary, the context that HN prefixes offer in my opinion makes code more readable (and especially more maintainable when you return to code six months later…).

I’ll go along with you on that one

I would only have the name describe the implementation semantics if it was particularly important (such as your example of having the same data in two different formats in a single function).

If the implementation is either “obvious” or irrelevant, I would omit it from the name (and that is usually the case). If your functions are small, you can easily see how a name is used and the actual implementation is “irrelevant”.

For me, readable code always takes precedence.

While yours is slightly more readable, your notation feels just like hungarian notation as well, just with the data type in a different place.

Not to say that I don’t prefer yours; just saying that implementation is very similar.

strIDs or idList?

arrIDs or idArray?

I’m all for readable, English, semantically correct names. I’m against cryptic prefixes that make code hard to read.

strIDs = “1,2,3″
arrIDs = ListToArray( strIDs )

really, there’s no different between the INTENT of these two forms of data, so, I don’t think they really require different names. They are just different formats of the same thing. But, with hungarian notation, you can easily tell the difference.

Sure, you could do something like:

IDList = “1,2,3″
IDs = ListToArray( IDList )

But to mean, this feels much more awkward.

To quote the “it depends” justification for a lot of differing opinions, I reckon it depends if the convention helps you structure your code in a predicable and logical manner that allows other to follow with ease.

Hey, if we all called it a Design Pattern it would be acceptable for people to hold differing opinions on the concept and implementation and for them all to valid and “cool”

I still stand by that blog post (from three and a half years ago – OMG!) which comments on Joel’s “Wrong” article…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation

I think if you read the whole of the Joel article I’m not sure that he is agreeing with us. I think he likes Apps Hungarian but not necesarly Systems Hungarian. Plus you’ll attract the scour of Sean…

http://www.corfield.org/blog/index.cfm?do=blog.entry&entry=D1CB9656-0284-4F53-209C8F9F6159FB8D

…and get put on his DNH list!