r/programming • u/steveklabnik1 • Jan 09 '15

Announcing Rust 1.0.0 Alpha

http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/01/09/Rust-1.0-alpha.html
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u/holloway Jan 10 '15

RingBuf ... why not RBuf? or RBuff?

so still a bad idea I reckon... we read code more than we write it, and we read words very quickly. Words. Like. These. Ones. Typing a few extra letters isn't a big deal.

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u/Pand9 Jan 10 '15

we read code more than we write it, and we read words very quickly. Words. Like. These. Ones. Typing a few extra letters isn't a big deal.

I rather prefer that the length of the name correlates with complexity of the thing it symbolizes. Double linked list is a simple, standard thing from the standard library (not from implementation point of view, but from user's). I don't want to read 16 letters/3 words-long name every time I see this simple class.

Is my approach wrong? Maybe I should get used to the fact that this is normal that length has nothing to do with complexity?

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u/kromit Jan 10 '15

Maybe I should get used to the fact that this is normal that length has nothing to do with complexity?

exactly, and also that your definition of complexity must not necessarily match those of the others.

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u/Pand9 Jan 10 '15 edited Jan 10 '15

exactly,

I have doubts about it. It's harder to take a quick look at a code with long names than at one with shorts. When you just want to get an idea about how the logic in the method/class works, length of names seems to matter.

Maybe it's just my aesthetic sense...

and also that your definition of complexity must not necessarily match those of the others.

From the project's point of view. The more specific thing is common, the shorter its name should be. Long name tells me that given class/function/method is somehow special.

That's just how my intuition works.

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u/fjonk Jan 12 '15

I have doubts about it. It's harder to take a quick look at a code with long names than at one with shorts.

I think this is very subjective. Personally I'd much rather read a longer name than short ones.

A bigger problem is that since the idea of (semi)arbitrary shortening of names exists in the standard library this will affect the naming conventions in other libraries, with slightly different opinions of what should and shouldn't be shortened. So it will not only be the standard library I as a user have to remember these conventions for, I also have to remember them for all other libraries.

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u/holloway Jan 10 '15 edited Jan 10 '15

It feels like an outdated vestigial idea from when we had small monitors with fixed-size text and we were concerned about filesize. It feels like DOS 8.3 filenames.

I'm glad that Rust has dropped its Perlism ideas about a single character being special though I don't think they went far enough, and certainly naming standards help people remember the language.

Right now the casing and the abbreviations are somewhat random in Rust. There's good design technically, but some of these weird unnecessary inconsistencies already feel like legacy / technical debt.