[Haskell-cafe] Re: Allowing hyphens in identifiers

[Luke Palmer]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Richard O'Keefe <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> On Dec 17, 2009, at 4:45 AM, Ben Millwood wrote:
>>
>> By the way, I like camelCase because I think that in most cases you
>> *don't* want to break identifiers up into their component words
>
> My experience has been that in order to make sense of someone else's
> code you *HAVE* to break identifiers into their component words.
> With names like (real example) ScatterColorPresetEditor, the eye
> *can't* take it in at once, and telling the difference between that
> and ScatterColorPresentEditor would be a pain.  Break them up
> Ada-style as Scatter_Colour_Preset_Editor and
> Scatter_Colour_Present_Editor and you're away laughing.

I don't know what experience you could have had that led you to
believe that *I* have to break identifiers into component words.  I am
kind of just being a pedant, but I think that using the word "I"
throughout this paragraph instead of "you" will more fairly draw
attention to the fact that, throughout it, you are still talking about
your own experience.

I don't like to get caught up into this kind of argument, but my own
opinion is that phrases don't make good words.
If we write-text English-language using word-phrase-uninflected as
words, no matter-verb the word-spacing, it would be difficulty-hard to
read-text.  My preferred way to increase the readability of code is to
keep names short and *limited in scope*.

Luke

> Here's another *real* baStudlyCaps identifier taken from a real
> (and useful) program someone else wrote:
> WEKA_AttributeSelectionEvaluationRanker_SymmetricalUncert
>
>> - you
>> read and understand what the function does once, and then you use it
>> as a word in its own right.
>
> I defy anyone to recognise
> WEKA_AttributeSelectionEvaluationRanker_SymmetricalUncert
> as a word in its own right.
>
>> Any resemblance to actual English is
>> really just a mnemonic of sorts.
>
> Take a look at another typical example of the genre:
> TransformerFactoryConfigurationError
> "transformer factory configuration error" -- the resemblance
> to actual English is more than accidental.
>
> A sample of a little over 2000 Java class names had this
> length distribution.
>
>  1: 10
>  2: 9
>  3: 35
>  4: 55
>  5: 53
>  6: 72
>  7: 97
>  8: 114
>  9: 127
> 10: 158
> 11: 116
> 12: 145
> 13: 150
> 14: 131
> 15: 120
> 16: 109
> 17: 96
> 18: 84
> 19: 56
> 20: 57
> 21: 53
> 22: 53
> 23: 37
> 24: 21
> 25: 29
> 26: 8
> 27: 9
> 28: 5
> 29: 5
> 31: 2
> 33: 3
> 35: 1
> 36: 3
> 37: 2
> 39: 2
> 44: 2
> 47: 1
> 48: 1
> 49: 1
> 50: 1
> 57: 1
>
> Looking at the number of words in each of these "phrases",
> the distribution is
>  1: 334  16.5%
>  2: 893  44.1%
>  3: 578  28.6%
>  4: 161   7.5%
>  5:  43   2.1%
>  6:  17   0.8%
>  7:   8   0.4%
>
> Now on a sample of English text (the WSJ collection),
> the commonest word length was 3 letters and the longest
> was 26.  These Java class names are clearly quite unlike
> the words we're used to reading (which would count against
> my ideas about readability except that they _are_ quite
> like English _phrases_).
>
> I don't have similar figures handy for Haskell.  You thought
> myExamplesLikeThisAreMadeUp?  Nope, things that long and with
> that many words in the phrase are _not_ rare in seriously
> baStudly code.
>
> If you can see a 57-character 7-word class name as a single
> "word", you have very different eyes from me.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>