Hi.
https://github.com/php/php-src/commit/aa203477bc24b1fadc16d65533c1749162260592
was my commit, put together as a result of discussions on this list
(and sidebars). I can try to speak to it from memory.
Note that it also encourages this weird C style naming with
abbreviations, hence, I would be open for discussing it.
It was 2000, 16 years ago.
WRT: "C style naming": C style PHP, *was* a big part of the PHP
adoption base in 2000. No objects. No inheritance. No classes. No
namespaces. Folks were also coming to PHP from ColdFusion, from Perl,
from JavaScript, and bringing their language conventions with them.
Without many guide rails, there was a weird mix of CreaTive_nameing
(and spelling). Conventions like verbnoun, Noun_Verb,
parent_Verb_noun, Parent(Noun())....(and most imaginiable
permutations) were sprinkled throughout the code, throughout
documentation, throughout the community... and one of the earliest
public complaints about PHP was about about inconsitent function
naming. The goal was to bend the curve, over the years, to bring some
order and consistency, not just to internal function naming (as in
this case), but to the entire PHP ecosystem. Thus, the standards about
parent naming, about underscores and....
...Abbreviation: In 2000, most PHP code was typed, manually, No IDE
completion, no built-in syntax checking, no code generators, every
single keystoke was a human hammering away in emacs/vi, BBedit,
Notepad (etc.), and longer function names tended to decrease code
quality (due to increased human error potential), and take up valuable
screen space (800x600 pixels on emergency terminals, though a nice
developer setup could have had 1024x768 pixels on a screen, all *at
the same time*.) Coding houses still had rules like "maximum of 80
characters per line", to encourage brevity. Abbreviation in this
environment made for more compact code, with less typing errors, but
came with the costs of inconsistent abbreviations, and decreased
readability.
In 2016, using an editor with built in syntax highlighting,
auto-completion, while at coding desks measuring in thousands of
pixels across multiple screens, it seems a bit dated, but when
debugging text files with vi on a spare monochrome terminal session,
late night over a modem at 3,600 Kbps, those things mattered a great
deal. For folks who are still using modems, terminals, and updating
their PHP on 800 pixel screens, I imagine they might still matter.
-Ronabop
Make names of routines as long as necessary
Research shows that the optimum average length for a variable name is
9 to 15 characters. Routines tend to be more complicated than
variables, and good names for them tend to be longer. Michael Rees of
the University of Southampton thinks that an average of 20 to 35
characters is a good nominal length (Rees 1982). An average length of
15 to 20 characters is probably more realistic, but clear names that
happened to be longer would be fine.
A study by W. J. Hansen found that longer names are better for rarely
used variables or global variables and shorter names are better for
local variables or loop variables (Shneiderman 1980). Short names are
subject to many problems, however, and some careful programmers avoid
them altogether as a matter of defensive-programming policy.
