"Rules are to make you think before you break them." – Terry Pratchett
Some guidelines to follow for coding to increase collaboration efficiency.
- Name variables meaningfully.
- It pays of to think hard about it, because coming up with names is O(1) while trying to decipher names is O(“amount of people that try to understand the code”).
- Don’t be afraid of long variable names; it is much better to have a long obvious name than a short name that does not “flow” while reading code.
- Avoid greek letter names such as epsilon, eta or gamma. The right variable names are often offset, step_rate or decay_factor. Even if the paper you are implementing is using certain greek names, a follow up won’t. Also, mathematical formulas in papers and source code are different things with different objectives.