blog/content/books/things-i-learnt/units/index.md

+++ title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Units Makes Things Clear" date = 2019-07-17

[taxonomies] tags = ["books", "things i learnt", "units", "explicit"] +++

You know what's one of the worst function names ever? sleep().

Sleep for how long? It is seconds or milliseconds?

Now let me ask you this: Would it clearer if the function was called sleepForMs()? Would you understand that the function would make the application sleep for a number of milliseconds?

What about sleepForSecs()? Do you understand that this will force your application to sleep for a number of seconds?

What if, instead of using the function name, you could use sleep("10s")? Does it make clear that you want it to sleep for 10 seconds?

That's why adding units to the function or parameters make sense. It removes the ambiguity of what it means and doesn't rely on some specialized IDE/Editor that display the parameter names.

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