Programming

It looks to me like they did it this way so that it could have natural-language names in many languages. So, the function Z10096 is called "is palindrome" in English, but if you're coding in Japanese you can call it "回文の判定". I don't think the idea is for people to refer primarily to the alphanumeric soup version; I think that's just the unique identifier for the database.

It does look like it's leading to some issues, though. E.g., someone added a test for the "is palindrome" function which uses a somewhat common example: "Straw? No, too stupid. I put soot on warts." Now, a human would probably say that this is a palindrome, because it's got the same letters forwards and backwards, but most of the implementations disagree, because they consider the spaces, capitalization, and punctuation to be part of the string; that is, they test whether the input string and its reverse are equal. So someone (possibly the same person) has added a second python implementation which ignores spaces, capitalization, and punctuation, and mentions that in its name on the page.

Fundamentally this function is solving a different problem than the others (as demonstrated by the differing results on the relevant test), so should it get its own number and page? should there be a "palindrome disambiguation" page? This seems like something the site will have to figure out how to handle.

"Our goal is knowledge, so we're going to obfuscate everything to fuck and make things unreadable"

Tbf it wasn't so much the names that tripped me as the weird Python operator. I would've never guessed that's a string reversal if you hadn't told me (I don't know much Python beyond recognizing the syntax). If I had to guess I would've said it's an array pop.