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The art and difficulty of naming in programming

Horace FAYOMI on February 26, 2022

Important note: Do not read any of the comments in the thread without solving the challenge. This article is a follow of my very first article Ev...
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fayomihorace profile image
Horace FAYOMI •

I drop the solution here anyways.

def print_items_counts(array):
    item_map_count = {}
    for item in array:
        if item_map_count.get(item):
            item_map_count[item] += 1
        else:
            item_map_count[item] = 1

    for item, count in item_map_count.items():
        print(f"{item}: {count}")
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geraldew profile image
geraldew •

If we're talking about clarity then it is misleading to use

 if item_map_count.get(item):
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when there is no apparent use for that value. Instead it is clearer to use

 if item in item_map_count :
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So it's not just choice of variable names that affect clarity.

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Horace FAYOMI •

You're right geraldew, thanks.

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yannickkiki profile image
yannickkiki • • Edited

Nice article, waiting for the part 2!

Just for the record, we could also write this part

if item_map_count.get(item):
    item_map_count[item] += 1
else:
    item_map_count[item] = 1
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as this

item_map_count[item] = 1 + item_map_count.get(item, 0)
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Horace FAYOMI •

Beautiful indeed, I like shorthands. Thanks.

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Horace FAYOMI •

And the same thing could be achieved using build in python library collections.Counter like this:

collections.Counter(array)
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ooling profile image
Sam oo Líng •

Great! I'm waiting for part 2

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Horace FAYOMI •

Thanks Sammy. Don't, it will come ^_^.

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Jonas Petri •

That was a great article!
It took me a while to figure out what the program actually did, just because of how poorly the variables were named.

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Horace FAYOMI •

Thanks Jonas.

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Tomas Forsman •

This was not really an example of simply bad naming, this was intentionally misleading naming with "booleans".

Here is how I would set bad names:

def process_list(lst):
    result_dict = {}
    for item in lst:
        if result_dict.get(item):
            result_dict[item] += 1
        else:
            result_dict[item] = 1

    for key, value in result_dict.items():
        print(f"{key}: {value}")
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And here is how far I could take this with help from the other comments. Perhaps a bit overkill...

from collections import Counter
from typing import List, Any

def print_item_counts(array: List[Any]) -> None:
    """
    Print the count of each item in the input array.

    Args:
        array (List[Any]): The list of items to be counted.

    Example:
        >>> print_item_counts(['apple', 'banana', 'apple'])
        apple: 2
        banana: 1
    """
    if not array:
        print("The array is empty.")
        return

    item_count = Counter(array)
    for item, count in item_count.items():
        print(f"{item}: {count}")
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I know Docstring isn't part of this but for the sake of a clarity example I included it; not for readability (it actually makes the code a bit less readable imho) but for documentation and IDE tooling.

Reminder to post the next part 😀