I suspect if you actually measure the increase in character count it's something like 1 extra character per 2 pages of code. If that makes a difference then maybe you should listen to your tendons. If you're typing more than a few pages of code a day, you're doing something wrong - most likely failing to properly abstract your code in one way or another.
I think the real reason for these obfuscations is that nerds like obfuscation. It makes them feel clever to understand something that looks confusing to the non-initiated.
The reason you want commonly used operators to be short is so that most of the information you see on your screen is the content of your program. It's the same point Tufte makes about data-ink ratio in graphs. Conversely, long names and required boilerplate are like the stuff he calls "chartjunk."
You see the same thing in math notation. Do you think mathematicians use an integral symbol instead of writing out the word "integral" because it makes them feel clever? I think it's because the resulting bloat would make math expressions harder to read, not easier.
I would agree that conciseness is a good reason to create a special symbol when it outweighs the cost of obfuscation and would only suggest measuring it and weighing the two instead of going with terseness by default.
For example, most equations have relatively few symbols and typically writing out "integral" might double that number. If it could be shown that "mac" vs. "macro" or "car" vs "first" halves your character count, then I think that would make a good case for their use. But if it only reduces the character count by a few percent or less, then AFAICS, it's not a reasonable tradeoff and can only guess that readability isn't the underlying motivation.
Initially I tried to make operator/variable names descriptive, but as time went on I became tired of typing every descriptive name again and again so, obviously, I tried to establish a balance between readability and convenience... However, the more I code the more I notice the names become shorter and find it takes effort to achieve meaningful names. That balance is going to be different person to person, but I will hazard a guess that the more you code the shorter the names become.
as an example (not that the function works):
(def fill (table-name with)
(filltable table-name with))
(def fillcup (with size)
(let cup size
(fill cup with)))
(fillcup "coffee" 8oz*)
The above is ideally how I would name names, but then find myself trying to incorporate the data type into the name...
(def fillcup (with-string size-table)
(let cup size-table
(fill cup with-string)))
which I think is equally as bad as:
(def fillcup (s tb)
(let cup tb
(fill cup s)))
This last one is bad as 'tb' may tell it's a table, but what is it conceptually? A size table...
So here are my options:
* the idealized version isn't descriptive enough
* if all my code were fully descriptive I would be
worse off reading and typing everything.
* the short form is just as bad as both the idealized
version and the descriptive version.
So it doesn't surprise me that people go with the short form, the lesser of evils - perhaps ?
The worst part is that because all the options suck
I end up doing things like:
(def fillcup (with-str size-tb)
(let cup size-tb
(fill cup with-str)))
Which by then I hate my code and should have just stuck with the idealized or the short.
I personally wish there were a means to quickly identify the data-type without having to incorporate it into the name, something like a hover tag - this would, more often, allow myself to afford the meaningful without being overly descriptive.
(I currently use textmate to write code and the terminal for the repl).
Just and opinion from a hobby programmer with only a few hundred hours programming experience.
"The sticking point is compression-tolerance. As you write code through your career, especially if it's code spanning very different languages and problem domains, your tolerance for code compression increases. It's no different from the progression from reading children's books with giant text to increasingly complex novels with smaller text and bigger words."
If my understanding is vaguely correct, Yegge argues for compact code for the same reasons pg does.
I personally wish there were a means to quickly identify the data-type
Something that an editor for a dynamic language can give you is run-time analysis of your code - so, indeed, a mouse-over could in fact give you a list of the types assigned to any given symbol. This is something I'd love to get welder to do ... it's entirely possible, in theory :)
Alternatively, you could write your own function definition macro that lets you specify param types and checks them for you at runtime:
I enjoyed the first half - then he went on and on and on....
My goal is to try making code readable enough that documentation or 'metadata' is barely needed. I'm going to rework my code and start keeping my code idealized - not descriptive - not short.
I'm going see how it works when I drop the data type tagging all together and hope one day when I am a little more knowledgeable I will be able to craft a solution.
Maybe in a few years I'll let you know how it went :)
T
