[Haskell-cafe] Line noise

[Andrew Coppin]

Ketil Malde wrote:
> The rationale for having long names is that you have too many names,
> and too large a scope to keep track of them all in your head.  Needing
> long names is a symptom that your code is too complex, and that you
> should refactor it.
>   

Well, yeah. In Haskell, functions tend to be rather shorter than in 
procedural languages, so there's less call for dissambiguation because 
there are fewer variables in scope.

> The other problem with "descriptive" names is that it is not
> automatically checked by the compiler, and thus it often ends up being
> misleading.  Incorrect documentation is worse than no documentation.
>   

That's true enough.

>> Nobody is going to realise that "[x]" means a list.
>>     
>
> And C is utterly incomprehensible, since from my Pascal background, I
> just *know* that curly braces denote comments.  Come on, expecting
> somebody to understand a language without an extremely basic
> understanding of fundamental syntactical constructs is futile.
>   

Point taken. I still think "List x" would have been clearer, but nobody 
is going to change the Haskell Report now...

>> well you can see why people are getting lost! ;-)
>>     
>
> Yes, by refusing to adapt to any syntax but the single one they know.
>   

Some people will glance at Haskell and think "hey, that doesn't look 
like source code, I can't read that". But given the number of times I've 
explained all this stuff, you'd think one or two people would have got 
it by now...

>> Only if you can figure out that "Map" means what every other
>> programming language on the face of the Earth calls a
>> "dictionary". (This took me a while!)
>>     
>
> Except for where it is called an "associative array" or "hash table"?
> Terminology is inconsistent, Haskell happens to draw more of it from
> math than from other programming languages.
>   

Heh, let's not argue over technical terms... ;-)

Most people seem far more confused by what a "fold" might be.