On Dec 13, 2009, at 3:44 AM, Daniel Fischer wrote:
Am Freitag 11 Dezember 2009 01:20:55 schrieb Richard O'Keefe:
On Dec 11, 2009, at 3:00 AM, Daniel Fischer wrote:
Am Mittwoch 09 Dezember 2009 23:54:22 schrieb Richard O'Keefe:
Given the amazinglyUglyAndUnreadably baStudlyCaps namingStyle that went into Haskell forNoApparentReasonThatIHaveEverHeardOf,
mb_t's_bcs the ndrscr_stl is considered far uglier and less readable by others
Come ON. Argue honestly!
Thanks, but I have to return that compliment.
Not a bit of it. "mb_t's_bcs the ndrscr_stl" was NOT playing fair and you knew it.
I claim that the part not using insanely abbreviated words (isConsidered, farUglier, byOthers) *is* readable. Also that moderately abbreviated words are readable in camelCase as well as under_score.
I guess we must mean different things by "readable" then. I've approached my head of department about running an experiment.
(granted, underscore-style with nonabbreviated words is not unreadable, but still extremely ugly)?
Who "grants" that underscore separation with fully written words is "still extremely ugly"? Not me!
Is that remark really unclear,
Yes, it is really unclear. It read as "x (granted that y)". For clarity, it should have been "(still extremely ugly, granted that underscore-style with nonabbreviated words is not unreadable)".
Nobody *grants* anything is ugly or not, that is an aesthetic judgment, as such entirely a matter of personal preference - you can agree with it or not.
Where is it written that aesthetic judgements are _entirely_ a matter of personal preference? As a student I was in the Archaeological society. One of the things I learned was this: - many ancient cultures would ritually "kill" grave goods - some grave goods would be smashed up, others would just have a chip out of them - as a rule, the ones that were least damaged were the ones the archaeologists considered to be the most beautiful (after repair). If an aesthetic sense about pots can be shared by modern archaeologists and people living five thousand years ago, it's hardly "entirely personal". What you may not appreciate is that I have been a Smalltalk programmer for a long time. I've read and written a lot of code like printSolutions (self sendSolutionsUsing: Empty and: Empty to: [:p :n | Transcript nextPutAll: 'p = '; print: p; nextPutAll: ', n = '; print: n; nextPut: $.; cr. true "stop after reporting first solution"] ) ifFalse: [ Transcript nextPutAll: 'No solutions.'; cr]. If it were just a matter of experience, then this experience should surely have taught me to love baStudlyCaps.
I have not been able to discover an experimental study of word separation style effect on readability in programming. I've been wondering about running a small one myself, next year. But there is enough experimentally determined about reading in general to be certain that visible gaps between words materially improves readability, and internal capital letters harm it. Now that applies to ordinary text, but until there's evidence to show that it doesn't apply to program sources, it's a reasonable working assumption that it does.
I doubt that.
Until the evidence is in, what other reasonable working assumption is there?
Sourcecode is so different from ordinary text (a line of sourcecode rarely contains more than four or five words),
OK, let's try it. Shakespeare sonnet number 1, first four lines, but split into shorter chunks With spaces: From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty's rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory: With underscores: From fairest_creatures we desire_increase, That thereby beauty's_rose might_never_die, But as the_riper should by_time decease, His tender_heir might_bear his_memory: With baStudlyCaps: From fairestCreatures we desireIncrease, That thereby beauty'sRose mightNeverDie, But as theRiper should byTime decease, His tenderHeir mightBear hisMemory: baStudlyCaps doesn't read any better with short lines.
that I'd be very wary to transfer the findings for one to the other.
It's not uncommon for style guides to explicitly recommend that program code should be spaced like text. Apple notoriously violate this in Objective C. Where Smalltalk would have this sendSolutionsUsing: Empty and: Empty to: that Objective C practice is to write [this sendSolutionsUsing:Empty and:Empty to:that]
If somebody claimed that of
x <- take_while some_condition some_list
and
x <- takeWhile someCondition someList
either was objectively more readable than the other, I wouldn't believe it without lots and lots of hard evidence.
"Persaude a man against his will, he's of the same opinion still." How _much_ evidence? That's an artificial example. Haskell code doesn't tend to look like that. It's much more likely to be a choice between x' <- takeWhile p x and x' <- take_while p x I'll repeat the run length figures I previously posted today, but this time as percentages len pct 1 67% 2 22% 3 7% 4 3% 5 1% >5 <1%
for me the underscores push the space-separated parts together, so that I have the tendency to bracket it
x <- take (while some) (condition some) list
Such lines are rare. In my sample (very little of which was my own), under 14% of (lines having at least one identifier) had two or more internal capitals. Let's look at the number of internal capitals per run: 0 99324 79% 1 20761 16% 2 4100 3% 3 791 3..10 all have under 1% each; 4 221 the sum is 2% 5 68 6 11 7 14 8 4 9 0 10 1 takeWhile someCondition someList has three internal capitals, so it's one of just the 5% of lines with three or more. Let's try a more specific question: what proportions of runs have the pattern aB cD eF? 44 out of 125295, or 0.00035. You're asking me to sacrifice readability everywhere else for the sake of one line in every 2850? (Not that I do find that line more readable in basStudlyCaps.) In any case, I think it's just possible that the point of the thread may have been lost, which is that it is possible and practical to let *both* the people who like to read and write baStudlyCaps *and* the people who don't see what they find readable *without* impairing readability for the others. takeWhile can be automatically converted to take_while for viewing and editing. take_while can be automatically converted to takeWhile for viewing and editing. All without confusion except when both styles are used at once. I for one never suggested that baStudlyCappers should stop doing their thing and do my thing; I just don't want them inflicting it on me (and others like me). I quite see the justice of the argument running the other way, and I *don't* advocate baStudlyCappers being made to read and write readable_identifiers and (at least in this thread) never did.