I've tried using longer type variable names in some of my personal projects and found a surprising problem: it became harder to tell types from value-level expressions at a glance. In a lot of cases, I actually found the resulting code harder to read on net.

There are still times when I use longer type variable names in my code, but I now think that single-letter names are actually a good default—I need a good reason to deviate from them.

I think this happens because type signatures tend to be short, relatively self-contained and often repeated. I want to be able to parse type signatures quickly, at a glance. Longer type variables might be clearer the first time you encounter a library, but they often become a pain once you're familiar with it. (I follow the same reasoning for using short names for function arguments and local definitions that are used in a restricted scope.)

:browse through Parsec and consider how many ParsecTs you see, often with multiple in a single type signature. With this much repetition, variables consistently named by connection become useful. Sure, you might need to learn the convention, but the up-front work pays off for itself in any non-trivial use of the library. Of course, there should also be clear documentation on the type definition defining what the variables mean. Gabriel Gonzalez's Pipes library is a perfect example of how this can be done.

On Aug 10, 2017 6:32 PM, "Jeffrey Brown" <jeffbrown.the@gmail.com> wrote:
Haskellers tend to use uninformative single-letter type variables. A case in point:

    Megaparsec> :i ParsecT                                                         
    type role ParsecT nominal nominal representational representational
    newtype ParsecT e s (m :: * -> *) a ...

I've gotten used to the conventions that "a" stands for anything and "m" stands for monad -- but without digging into the code it wasn't initially obvious to me whether "s" stood for stream or state.

Single-letter type variables don't seem to always be the standard, though:
    
    Megaparsec> :i between
    between :: Applicative m => m open -> m close -> m a -> m a
            -- Defined in ‘Control.Applicative.Combinators’

My questions are: (1) Are the brevity gains worth the confusion costs? (2) If I'm looking at a new library for the first time and trying to figure out what a type variable stands for, is there a canonical way to do it? Flailing through documentation at random? Unifying types by hand?

--
Jeff Brown | Jeffrey Benjamin Brown
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