Mads Lindstrøm wrote:
Andrew Coppin wrote:
Idiomatic Haskell seems to consist *only* of single-letter variable names.
The more abstract (generic) thing gets, the less likely you will be able to find a telling name. And if you cannot find a telling name, you can just as well make it short. And as Haskell is more abstract, we get more short identifiers. E.g. in your earlier sorting function:
qsort (x:xs) = ...
what would you propose to call the elements?
Well, qsort (element : list) would be maximally intuitive, but who's going to implement it like that? ;-) Now of course in C, you'd be forced to write something like list qsort(int x, list xs) which makes it completely unambiguous what these things are - what their type is. But in Haskell, even if you add a type signature: qsort:: (Ord x) => [x] -> [x] Nobody is going to realise that "[x]" means a list. And it's still not clear where ":" comes from, or... well you can see why people are getting lost! ;-)
However, I will grant you that Map k v, could have used longer type variables. But we are not alone with using one letter type variable names http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/HashMap.html . And frankly, in this specific case, I think most programmers (Haskell or non-Haskell) will be able to guess what k and v means, when they are standing right after Map.
Only if you can figure out that "Map" means what every other programming language on the face of the Earth calls a "dictionary". (This took me a while!)