Jim Hall

I think you'll really enjoy this book. I loved reading it! Lots of great stories about the origins of Unix and Unix commands, and the people behind it.

For a short function, I'll still use i. But it has to be something like ten lines long. Otherwise, I prefer to use more descriptive names now, so it's easier to pick up the code later. I aim for 6 to 8 characters long, if I can. Not too long, but long enough that it provides enough description.

And I like to keep names descriptive. These days, if I write a function to evaluate something and return a true/false value, I like to name the function with "is_" as a prefix. For example, the classic "is it odd?" test function is better named as is_odd() rather than just odd(). That way, you have code like this:

if (is_odd(value)) { ... }