On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 10:07 AM, Erling Hellenäs <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> In most common programing languages today names of functions and > variables are long. This is one of the most valuable ways that J and other 'terse' languages stand out from the crowd. > The program and the environment is often complex. Long names are needed to > describe complex operations in a complex environment. I don't think operations are any more complex than they were decades ago. In fact, I think operations have become more simple as we do more to connect different libraries together. > We choose to make the code self-documenting because we know we will have > problems keeping any documentation up to date. We copy and paste, we can > rename functions and variables in the whole program or the whole workspace, > there is autocomplete. With these tools long names does not slow us down. Long names take longer to read and to create. Naming things is one of the harder problems I think. > Short names would also cause problems with rename and refactoring. > I don't mean we should remove the symbols for our operations. When you > have some short complex operation you often can't describe it in words, > there are no reasonable names for the variables, the notation is then the > description you need. For these reasons you can also sometimes choose to > have short function and variable names. These short snippets most often > require comments and some up-to-date written documentation, as I see it. > >> >> I agree. I prefer clear notation and symbols over long names. It's easier for me to follow a train of symbols (with practice) than it is to read a sequence of long names and jump around lines to variable declarations ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
