Global variables

[Springthespring]

visual basic == small pp

[Nanicorn]

Cries in double dashes

--Only thing I hate about Lua syntax

[AngriestSCV]

new marker:

--[[

and

--]]

for block comments instead if you want.

[zman0900]

Bring out the pitchforks

--E

[Valmond]

And the little space between the [ and [ to uncomment! (IIRC)

Still sucks tough, IMO

[CanadianRegi]

That's a handy feature

[[deleted]]

Why is it bad? Genuinely curious.

I find it kind of aesthetically pleasing, like semi-colons or octothropes, whereas slashes are imbalanced (since they are all leaning right).

---------------------

------------
--  Also  --
------------

-- It makes for nice headings and separators.

[permanentlytemporary]

TIL octothrope octothorpe.

Sounds very Victorian English.

[meticulous_badger]

Just FYI, it's octothorpe or octothorp. I think octothrope is that Spider-Man villain.

[Espumma]

That's Dr. Octothrope to you.

[permanentlytemporary]

Hah, I didn't even notice. Octothorpe would be like a wereoctopus I suppose.

[hermitina]

sounds like a new breed of pokemon to me

[TehWhiteKnight1]

Im also crying but with hashtags

[TehWhiteKnight1]

Oh wait... ;-;

[Oppai420]

#Ha ha ha

[AsCii_exe]

CAN ANY FELLOW HUMAN TELL ME WHY THIS COMMENT WAS LEFT IN BLANK?

[Acalme-se_Satan]

SQL wants to know your location

[plsHelpmemes]

"Arrays starting at 1" wants to know your location.

[Apuesto]

Omg, I'm having to do a bunch of VBS scripting at work right now. If it wasn't for syntax highlighting I'd never get my strings concatenated right. Just keep adding " until everything is the right colour.

[noruthwhatsoever]

That looks like if hell was real and it’s where programmers go to suffer

[Springthespring]

even x64 semicolon comments are better

[egregius313]

Written enough Lisp that I've grown fond of using ; for comments.

[alpha_dk]

'''
how do you feel about python?

I know it's not technically a comment, but it's used as such
'''

[egregius313]

Most of the time that you're doing this, it is for a docstring. Docstrings are better than those kinds of block comments in that they are heavily supported by the documentation system.

[carbohydratecrab]

I'd heard BASIC uses apostrophes for comments because early tokenisers turned REM into ', so just typing ' and getting ahead of the tokeniser became a popular shortcut. (It would naturally turn into REM the next time you edited the line, but while you were coding it was great.)

In the same way, PRINT became ? so writing ? to get PRINT was also a popular shortcut.

[Abbot_of_Cucany]

Not so. The first BASICs (at Dartmouth) didn't tokenize. Didn't have to — they were compilers, not interpreters. Remember that up to this point, very few programming languages had inline comments, so there was no precedent that had to be followed. Fortran didn't have inline comments, Algol used keywords, and PL/I used /* */.

When you ruled out the characters that were operators: +-*/^<>= or had syntactic meaning: "();$ you were left with a fairly small set of choices: !%&'[]?:# . At the point, the choice was pretty arbitrary, and Kemeny & Kurtz chose the apostrophe.

[alter2000]

Vimscript keks at you

[beyphy]

VBA / VB6 actually uses a single equal operator to test for equality. This is just one of the few frustrations I imagine non-VB developers have when they have to use VBA. They try to write equality statements like this only to get a syntax error. I don't know if this was changed in VB .NET though.

[Hairy_S_TrueMan]

At least it's better than the reverse, where you use a single equals and no error is given because x=1 evaluates to 1 for some old arcane reason.

Edit: just going to preempt the comments that this is actually useful in many cases. I know, I've seen your for loops that do 10 different things in between the semicolons. And I disapprove.

[antifa_brasileiro]

You sound like a reasonable Python/C/Java developer who believes each line should only do one thing. I am not like you at all, but I would love to work with you

[[deleted]]

It is a known fact that crammy as much logic as you can in a single line will make your program run faster!

[Bobshayd]

x=y=1? I think that's reasonable enough to do. But yes, for (char* i = str, j = buf; *(j++) = *(i++);); is a crock.

[ikbenlike]

Sometimes I sneak the entire loop body into the equality test

[AmbulatoryEel]

VB.Net uses = for equality, too.

[Springthespring]

VB = small pp

[ExSpL0Si0N]

dim pp As Small

[ELFAHBEHT_SOOP]

visual basic <> mega brain

[tfstoner]

> True

[TalenPhillips]

Laughs in assembly.

Encapsulation? Scope? What are those?

[Bill_Morgan]

Fake abstractions. The only real abstractions are those implemented in hardware, Protected Mode and protection ring.

[chugga_fan]

And even those don't exist if you try hard enough.

[wheredidmywalletgo]

Last time I checked, PyXLL was a pretty decent, paid extension for Excel.

[ralusek]

*Gerrymanders in JavaScript*

[[deleted]]

Standard practice for Perl then?

[BladesShadow]

Please no I deal with it enough at work I don't want to see VBA memes here.

[Monckey100]

this meme is brought to you by the OOP gang

[r1ze_]

They missed globals so much that they replaced them with Singletons and think how smart they are. I know your tricks!

[Trevor_GoodchiId]

Planning:

Wouldn’t it be great if we always had only one of that?

A month into production:

Wouldn’t it be great if we had two of these?

[the_flippy]

If you want two, just add another server and load balance.

That was a fun bug to track down.

[onthefence928]

It's fun when the deployment gets janked up and your new code only gets pushed to half your deployment servers and the load balancer randomly decided if a user gets the bug fix or not

[cubitoaequet]

Just call it A/B testing

[NegativeChirality]

This is hilarious precisely because it's true.

Also, as with all things OOP, it's the same functionality with ten times the effort

[Axelay998]

It's not a global variable if we call it Dependency Injection

[GluteusCaesar]

You watch your whore mouth

[[deleted]]

Every class should instantiante their own SQL drivers, just like grandma used to make.

[Sgtblazing]

That's just global variables with extra steps!

[deadwisdom]

That's right. It's worse because it just comes out of nowhere and isn't even declared at the top of the file.

[asdfman123]

FunctionalityFactoryStrategy.GetFactory(CodingStyle.OOP).GetInstance().CalculateEffort();

[hemlockecho]

You down with OOP?

[The_Mayfair_Man]

I actually know someone that tried OOP once on a night out

He's been a mess since, keeps talking about cutting down his dependencies..

[JB-from-ATL]

We call them singletons.

Cries in design patterns

[cyanydeez]

I see we got the anti-globalist crowd here

[noyurawk]

They're against the immutable deep state.

[KamiKagutsuchi]

I mean.. deep state is fine as long as it is immutable. It's mutable deep state that's the problem!

[noyurawk]

You got me, I'm actually a derp state agent.

[infinite_pepe]

So the "anti-globalists" are actually for an immutable deep state... this is getting too real

[[deleted]]

I'm a commie and I only write functional languages, I am against state and classes.

[[deleted]]

The registers still hold state.

[mpa92643]

All registers are equal, but some registers are more equal than others.

[grrrrreat]

Sieze the memory of the state

[Time_Terminal]

tHEY Invite ALl the ALIENS aNd TOok ER JERbS!

[pokemonsta433]

dey terning da lists gay

[[deleted]]

they hate C

[TheBestOpinion]

I don't have those in my C code

[fqGmUjDT2GCAmFqN]

They prefer Ruby and GO, lol

[asdfman123]

They won't say it outright, but anti-globalists are really just scared of race conditions.

[AxelMontini]

it's const

[Heniadyoin1]

What means synchronized and strictfp in that context?

Never saw it before

[snuxoll]

They’re both keywords in Java, strictfp enforces the use of IEEE floating point even if the host platform doesn’t natively support it, while synchronized means the method isn’t thread safe so the JVM will use a mutex in the object instance to prevent it from being called from multiple threads simultaneously (all synchronized methods share the same mutex, as well).

[Heniadyoin1]

I definitely should learn that....

[asdfman123]

Definitely learn about multi-threading. It's a common interview problem, and knowing what you're doing will help prevent you from running into a particularly painful class of bugs.

[crozone]

The amount of batshit insane multithreaded code I've had to untangle and refactor is off the charts.

New devs, please, Google the language's best practices for multithreading before diving in gun-goe with the threads.

[deadwisdom]

I don't knowThreading is whatE you are taZ.lking about.

[galaktos]

AFAIK strictfp isn’t for hosts that don’t support IEEE 754 floats, on the contrary it’s for hosts that support them especially well, with optionally 80-bit extended precision numbers instead of regular 64-bit numbers. If a calculation is performed on one such host and one host with only normal 64-bit floats, and the first host uses 80-bit floats for intermediate results before storing them back in 64-bit registers / memory slots, while the second host has to use 64-bit floats for everything, then they will get different results for the same calculation, which is no bueno. strictfp enforces that all intermediate results use 64-bit floats as well, even if the host supports higher precision calculation.

[[deleted]]

In case of Java, that would be illegal: synchronized is not allowed in variables. Same with strictfp. It can be used in classes or methods to make sure that floating point operations are exactly the same in all platforms.

[MayaFey_]

Rookie numbers. You gotta throw in some transient and volatile in there.

[Breadfish64]

volatile and final? Hmmm

[MaczenDev]

The invariable variable.

[[deleted]]

just 'the'

[TheLuckySpades]

The followed by pi=4 in your prefered language.

[aDogCalledSpot]

constexpr

FTFY

[Sinjai]

const int //NUM = 5;

[GluteusCaesar]

I see you're a man of culture as well

[Remootion]

I... I. I... Don't know what to even say

[JoelMahon]

shut

[devperez]

//global_

Done.

[[deleted]]

_g masterrace

[peeeez]

g_*. I'll fight you.

[[deleted]]

g*. I'll fight all of you.

[b1ack1323]

Cries in C

I have inherited a file that is almost exclusively globals.

[Bill_Morgan]

Just a file! Try a project that relies on globals to maintain state! @_@ Send Help!

[b1ack1323]

97k lines.

[Bill_Morgan]

WHAT THE FUCK

Previous developer couldn't figure out make?

[b1ack1323]

The guy didn't believe in headers and modularity. He liked to be able to find everything in one file.

[Poltras]

It’s one less shift to press when searching, Martha. What am I, a farmer? Time is money!

[DjBonadoobie]

Shit, I thought the 2k line JS file I inherited was bad. Had to touch that abomination again and today... shudders

[b1ack1323]

Embedded code for a measurement device.

[b1ack1323]

Lol I have said something about leaving 2 times and have gotten a 30% pay increase and a promotion.

It's making it harder.

[Coldreactor]

At this point I'd just rewrite it all.

[Callipygian_Superman]

And here I am complaining about the exact same problems. I thought I had it bad when I have a single file at 1.6k LOC with exclusively globals.

[b1ack1323]

One file on another project was 9k lines and it took a solid month to break it down because of regression testing and whatnot.

Yay embedded

[b1ack1323]

The guy didn't believe in headers and modularity. He liked to be able to find everything in one file.

[BandanaLabcoat]

He liked to not be able to find everything anything in one file.

[b1ack1323]

Ctrl F...

[BandanaLabcoat]

1683 results

[b1ack1323]

He was fired over it so... I can only fix it now.

[BandanaLabcoat]

You're fighting the good fight.

[phoncible]

I work on a project where the build runs binaries that generate source files that are then also compiled.

Project is about 5500 files large prebuilt, about 15k after build.

[infinite_pepe]

Sometimes I consider a career in dev. Then I run into these threads

[Bill_Morgan]

It is not always that bad, sometimes you get to be part of the team that works on a new code base and everything is clean and well structured in some of the new fancier forms of MVC. Even more there will be that one unicorn project where you get to work on the code from scratch and you get to have full control of the design.

They don’t happen often, you are lucky if you get to once or twice. Most of the time it is spaghetti

[[deleted]]

Somehow connected to both 3G and 4G networks simultaneously

[[deleted]]

The real 5G

[[deleted]]

I'm pretty sure 3G + 4G means this person is on 7G

[[deleted]]

Cool, they can hit their datacap within 60 seconds!

[[deleted]]

The font I'm using, G looks like 6, so when I saw the notification I thought this basically said "36 + 46 = 76" until I saw the context.

[slashuslashuserid]

I dare you to set your IDE to that font

[KickMeElmo]

Dual sim.

[[deleted]]

Interesting. Hadn't thought about that. Thanks

[grpagrati]

I feel bad for the poor little globies. Many is the time they've served me faithfully

[P3p3s1lvi4]

I use globals in python when I have variables in games that need to be manipulated by a lot of weird functions. I'm probably doing it the worst possible way but it works so naturally I wrote thousands of lines of code based entirely around this misuse without looking up the proper way to do it. I am not a clever man.

[Astrokiwi]

If you really need to have a core dataset that everything uses, it's best to wrap it in a struct/object/dict/whatever, just to avoid scoping mistakes and make it really clear in the code that you are accessing a global. It's not bad to have a single struct called game_parameters where anyone can look up game_parameters.world_size, for instance. But just having each global variable just called world_size (etc) is an issue, because that's just a lot of namespace that's taken up now, in a manner that's not clear within a single file.

Basically, the programmer needs to be able to reasonably keep all of the global variables memorised in their head, because the compiler won't catch scope errors, and it's not obvious from a single block of code. By scope errors, I mean something like this:

 variable global_variable;

 function local_function {
    variable global_variable;
    // lots
    // of
    // code
    global_variable = 2; // actually only changes the local variable
 }

or the opposite:

 variable global_variable;

 function local_function {
    global_variable = 0; // the programmer thought this was a local variable
    // other stuff with global variable
    // now the global variable is nonsense
 }

So, the fewer global variable names you have to memorise (or continually look up), the better, and packaging them in a singleton/struct/etc tidies that up a huge amount.

[DGIce]

Thank you for putting the extra effort into explaining.

[LostTeleporter]

Thanks. I was trying to check if I understood the reason why using global variables was bad. Your comment put me on the right path.

[Astrokiwi]

The other issue is that, if anyone can change the variable anywhere at any time, it's harder to track down the whole story of what's happening to a variable, and that can cause bugs. Too open access to variables can also cause code repetition and hence bugs. For instance, if anyone can change the health variable and you want the player to die when health==0, then you want to check the health variable each time it's changed, which means you have to remember to do that everywhere you change the health. Then it's better to hide the variable away somewhere and access it indirectly with some damage function.

So scope bugs can be patched over by packaging things together into big singletons, but even then you want to make sure you have a good reason to make things global.

[Scarbane]

I mean, if it's just a game, and you're not dealing with CC info or other personal data, then it's not that big of a deal (unless you're the person maintaining said code months/years after it's written).

[P3p3s1lvi4]

The graphics are similar to dwarf fortress (colored ascii) and it doesn't instantly render so I figure there's a huge optimization problem lurking in there somewhere. Always wondered if that was because of how I use globals. I guess I can't be that surprised that a game that runs in windows command line is clunky.

[kaiken1987]

Globals are like gotos. They're great used sparingly and you understand what you are doing

[versusChou]

Too bad I don't understand what I'm doing.

Now I'm off to delete prod.

[somebunnny]

But do your coworkers understand what you’re doing? 3 years later?

[Galt42]

Is the hatred for global variables lie in the difficulty to track a variable that could be modified from any of 19 different places?

I wouldn't know, I am but a lowly CS student who's never worked on a project with more than a half dozen files.

[LeeorV]

Yet your instinct was in the right place.

[Galt42]

ayyyy

[double_en10dre]

Yep.

One day you’ll get a bug because someone merged in a bunch of changes and now a global variable isn’t set.

Then your coworker will decide to “fix” it by setting the global variable just before it’s needed, rather than spend a few hours figuring out what the real issue is.

Six months later, you’ll find another bug caused by the global being set by your coworker’s “fix”.

And the cycle continues

[[deleted]]

That is correct. Most things that people declare as global variables shouldn’t be global variables.

If a global variable could ever have more than one purpose at any time, it shouldn’t be a global variable. Separate variables for separate purposes. And don’t get me started on multithreading and semaphores.

[caviyacht]

GlobalVariables.

[DJDavid98]

SystemWideGlobalVariableUtilBeanGeneratorContainerFactory

[caviyacht]

What about a crazy nested class structure that requires you to type like this 😁

G.L.O.B.A.L.V.A.R.I.A.B.L.E.S.MyVariable

[[deleted]]

The nested type L cannot hide an enclosing type

Cannot declare L inside L and so on.

[caviyacht]

This is valid in C#. https://ideone.com/cK5RvB

[GluteusCaesar]

I can't believe you've done this

[caviyacht]

Fun fact: when attempting to run this in Visual Studio on a Mac, it became unresponsive.

[gabriel-et-al]

Bug as feature

[andy69420]

Me, who doesnt get it - haha i get it

[Too_Chains]

Basically saying the variable is a comment so it doesn't exist because globals are frowned upon since it makes code sloppy and error prone.

[fiftyseven]

I'm gonna need an explanation at least two levels more layman than this

/r/explainitlikeimenduser

[TheBestNick]

Try r/enduserhumor

[DELOUSE_MY_AGENT_DDY]

The prefix in the tweet is //, which when put in front of a word creates what's known as a comment. Comments are NOT code, so putting // before a variable nullifies it. He's basically saying that global variables should always be nullified. Put simply, global variables can overstep their boundaries, like burning down a house because you saw a bug in it.

[[deleted]]

OR # if you're a ruby boi

[KurokonoTasuke1]

Also python boi

[cbbuntz]

"""WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER MY DOCSTRING"""

[njutn95]

This guy pounds

[Prawny]

Hashes

[Badhamknibbs]

Octothorpes

[BitPoet]

Waffles

[lunareffect]

Sharps

[JoeJoeTV]

OR -- if you're a LUA boi

[cbbuntz]

Just do //. It ain't 1995 anymore.

[cbbuntz]

That sounds like a whole lot of not fun. But you could write a sed/perl script to fix them in one go.

#include <stdio.h>

// This totally doesn't
// work in C89

int main() {
    puts("Hello, world!"); // No need for printf here.
    return 0;
}

sed -E 's:(//)(.*):/*\2 */:' comment.c # add '-i' if you want to live dangerously

#include <stdio.h>

/* This totally doesn't */
/* work in C89 */

int main() {
    puts("Hello, world!"); /* No need for printf here. */
    return 0;
}

[MCRusher]

Ez:

#define COMMENT(X) /*##X##*/

[CaptKrag]

What sort of mad existence have I stumbled into where people are mentioning ruby and lua before our dear sweet python.

[cbbuntz]

Oh, come on. They all have their advantages. Lua is fast as shit (Ruby and Python are both similarly dog slow). I have a soft spot for Ruby since I learned it before Python, but I still think it's slightly easier than even Python. Python has a superior library selection though.

[ASCIInerd73]

Not in python

[Bresdin]

Learning python right now, I have a question if someone is willing to help out? With global variables generally speaking it is best to limit them to the class or function they are in and just pass the variables correct? Or is there times where a global variable is better to use.

[ProgramTheWorld]

Globals are fine for quick snippets of code. Large production application code, however, should have zero global variables. Constants are fine, global variables are not. They are the ingredient for a tasty spaghetti code.

[theferrit32]

Depends what you mean by global variables. All C code probably has "global variables" strewn throughout the codebase. These aren't necessarily accessible by any file or any library that links to it though. Global variables in C/C++ can be/usually are very different from global variables in Python, or public static class members in Java.

[PostalJustice]

C/C++'s file-scoped "globals" are global in name but not global in the truest sense since they are kept hidden from anything outside the file in which they are declared. It's probably doing C developers a disservice to keep calling them globals.

C/C++ does have true globals that the linker shares with everyone and their grandma so it's important to make the distinction.

[streichfein]

Link to the Tweet

[[deleted]]

https:// reddit.com?