On Tuesday, 6 March 2012 at 18:06:46 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I have to disagree on this one.
If it was actually "gratuitouslyOverlongFullySpelledOutVariableNames" I might agree, but curr vs current is a whole other story. Abbreviating a concept makes sense: i, j, rather than iterationIndex or whatever. You might say "std.random.uniform" rather than "randomNumberFromASetWithAUniformDistribution". But, abbreviating /words/ is where it gets silly. "rndNumSetUniDist" is a worse name than the long one, since not only is it verbose, it has bizarre abbreviations to remember too! "dur" is the same concept as "duration"; it isn't a simpler name. It isn't even significantly shorter. The biggest difference is it isn't my first guess.
The fault is with inconsistency, not with abbreviations.
It is some of both: inconsistency with words I already know (regular English) is what leads to the first guess being wrong.
