On Tuesday, April 28, 2015 at 11:56:29 AM UTC-5, Scott Jones wrote: > > People who might realize, after becoming acquainted with Julia, for > general computing, or maybe for some light usage of the math packages, > might much rather have understandable names available, so they don't always > have to run to the manual... > With decent code completion in your editor, I don't think it takes any > more typing... >
There's a tradeoff. Reading is more common than writing--which at first makes long names sound appealing. But long names can also obscure algorithms. So you want names to be long enough to be unambiguous, but short enough that code can look like the algorithm you're implementing. Support for Unicode in identifiers is huge in that respect, and it is nice to write a (non-CompSci, in my case) algorithm in Julia that looks remarkably like what's in the textbook. And someone else working in my domain--the people who are reviewing and modifying my code--can very quickly grok that. If long names were unambiguously better, no one would pick on Java.
