On Dec 17, 2009, at 4:45 AM, Ben Millwood wrote:
By the way, I like camelCase because I think that in most cases you *don't* want to break identifiers up into their component words
My experience has been that in order to make sense of someone else's code you *HAVE* to break identifiers into their component words. With names like (real example) ScatterColorPresetEditor, the eye *can't* take it in at once, and telling the difference between that and ScatterColorPresentEditor would be a pain. Break them up Ada-style as Scatter_Colour_Preset_Editor and Scatter_Colour_Present_Editor and you're away laughing. Here's another *real* baStudlyCaps identifier taken from a real (and useful) program someone else wrote: WEKA_AttributeSelectionEvaluationRanker_SymmetricalUncert
- you read and understand what the function does once, and then you use it as a word in its own right.
I defy anyone to recognise WEKA_AttributeSelectionEvaluationRanker_SymmetricalUncert as a word in its own right.
Any resemblance to actual English is really just a mnemonic of sorts.
Take a look at another typical example of the genre: TransformerFactoryConfigurationError "transformer factory configuration error" -- the resemblance to actual English is more than accidental. A sample of a little over 2000 Java class names had this length distribution. 1: 10 2: 9 3: 35 4: 55 5: 53 6: 72 7: 97 8: 114 9: 127 10: 158 11: 116 12: 145 13: 150 14: 131 15: 120 16: 109 17: 96 18: 84 19: 56 20: 57 21: 53 22: 53 23: 37 24: 21 25: 29 26: 8 27: 9 28: 5 29: 5 31: 2 33: 3 35: 1 36: 3 37: 2 39: 2 44: 2 47: 1 48: 1 49: 1 50: 1 57: 1 Looking at the number of words in each of these "phrases", the distribution is 1: 334 16.5% 2: 893 44.1% 3: 578 28.6% 4: 161 7.5% 5: 43 2.1% 6: 17 0.8% 7: 8 0.4% Now on a sample of English text (the WSJ collection), the commonest word length was 3 letters and the longest was 26. These Java class names are clearly quite unlike the words we're used to reading (which would count against my ideas about readability except that they _are_ quite like English _phrases_). I don't have similar figures handy for Haskell. You thought myExamplesLikeThisAreMadeUp? Nope, things that long and with that many words in the phrase are _not_ rare in seriously baStudly code. If you can see a 57-character 7-word class name as a single "word", you have very different eyes from me.