Is it really tempting for people? They’ve given me too many headaches when I’ve had to reformat or add functionality to files.
Unless it’s a simple single use script that fit on the computer screen, I don’t feel like global variables would ever be tempting, unless it’s for constants.
Most people suck at software engineering.
Plus, there’s always the temptation to do it the shitty way and “fix it later” (which never happens).
You pay your technical debt. One way or another.
It’s way worse than any gangster.
Not if you leave the project soon enough. It’s like tech debt chicken.
Then, at your new job, you see garbage code and wonder what dumbass would put global variables everywhere
That’s how this industry works ;)
You’re gonna see that even if you were pious at your own job. So you’re only wasting time.
Just create a global object and stuff your variable in there. Now you have a global singleton and that’s not a purely bad practice :D
Not necessarily a bad practice if the singleton is immutable, and it’s provided via dependency injection for example.
As a hobby coder: “mmmhm, mmmm, mmhm… I know some of these words!”
Software dev is full of obscure keywords that describe otherwise pretty simple or basic concepts you stumble upon in practice naturally and that you probably already understand.
- singleton: a class/object that is designed to be single use, i.e. only ever instantiated with a single instance. Typically used when you use class/objects more for flow control or to represent the state of the program itself, rather than using it to represent data
- immutable: read-only, i.e. unchangeable
- dependency injection: basically when you pass a function or object into another function object, thereby extending their effective functionality, typically for modular code and to separate concerns.
Here’s one more of my favourite examples of such a keyword: memoization
