On Thursday, 8 November 2018 at 18:52:02 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
length is getting ridiculous
Having better editor support is nice but by "use better editor"
you meant use vim dont you? And even if I switch to vim it wont
solve my initial objection to one letter variable names. Its
needless hurdles. Not to mention the next person new to this will
likely have same problems like me. And the person after that etc.
Which comes to my recurring thought when dealing with dmd. How
the f@#k should I knew that? Documentation and instructions
around D project is almost non existant. Does idea pit of success
not apply to compiler?
Human brain is good at finding patterns. Its also good at finding
patters it wants to find where they dont exist. Your statement
that humans have no problems in disambiguating language is
completely false. Most people just ignore logical conflicts or
lack of information needed to correctly understand what is being
said. Most people dont put lots of effort in understanding what
exactly is being said and humans are bad at conveying their
thoughts trough words to begin with. Extreme case of this is all
forms of religious believes. Here is a clip where people give
definitions of God and none of them are the same
https://youtu.be/HhRo9ABvef4
and here is one where J.P. at least tries to disambiguate words.
https://youtu.be/q0O8Jw6grro
When people talk about God first they cant tell precisely what
they believe. Second they dont know precisely what others
believe. And third it doesnt even matter as long as you make
vaguely sounding sentences. Same extends to the rest of human
interactions and humans would happily go without noticing that
until they have to interact with computers where you have to
define everything precisely.
Your second idea that shorter words have less information is...
just... What? English is not floating point where length dictates
precision. In German maybe with one word created from combining
multiple but not in English.
Then you combined your both flawed ideas to produce paragraph
where good and bad ideas are mixed together.
No I did not strawman. I took Walters advice from NWCPP talk
precisely to show a flow in it. If variable name lenght should be
related to scope then changing scope should change variable name
lenght. You on the other hand changed advice to binary advice.
Either local and short or global and verbose
NWCPP talk
https://youtu.be/lbp6vwdnE0k?t=444
Code is read more often than written and should be optimized for
that. One letter variable names are not descriptive enough. In
short functions you can get away from paying mental price but in
long ones you do not.
