Gale Force

Or in other words: ! #! ->

Code monkeys have all these cute little names for various character combinations used in their code. Because programmers’ time is so much more valuable than anyone else’s they can’t call “!” an exclamation point…it’s a BANG! (what happens when you use the word “bang” followed by a “!”…is that a Bang-Bang?). Likewise, the !# is called a shebang because it would take far too long to say “Exclamation point hash”.

Wanting to be super cool, some co-workers and I added our own little code-ism to the mix. The “->” (PHP Object Dereference symbol) has been officially dubbed the “bop”. How much cooler are you going to sound in your next code review when you say:

“So I totally had this object I needed to dereference so I fired up Notepad and typed dollar sign variable name bop methodName open paren close paren (BTW - parentheses are called “parens” in code-speak). It was so sweet!”

OK, so you’ll never sound cool during a code review meeting…but you get the point.

So there you go…another contribution to mankind from yours truly. The “bop”. Have fun with it…name your next object instance $mmm and I guarantee you’ll chuckle every time you call a method of that object (admit it…you just laughed at that).

Spread the word…spread the love. -> = BOP ! (err…bang!)

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