3 ms·
No you misunderstood me. I'm saying the normal level of verbosity in english when applied to code is considered to be over verbose. I'm not even talking about a
by nendroid 6y ago
No you misunderstood me. I'm saying the normal level of verbosity in english when applied to code is considered to be over verbose. I'm not even talking about areas where there is domain expertise. There's no need to spell out the meaning of the word decoherence in quantum mechanics for the language of english or python when communicating with domain experts. But in python someone tends to use the words
decoAB = True
over
decoherenceOfTwoParticlesAandB = True
but in English they use.
The decoherence of two particles, particle A and particle B.
and not.
The deco of A B.
It's opposite logic for what is essentially an attempt to communicate the same concept.
Two languages where different levels of verbosity are considered to be normal. For programming be less explicit, use shorter names that are prettier but less clear, for English be absolutely clear, use correct grammar.... Why? Why do we feel programming languages need to less verbose and the english language needs to have a higher level of verbosity to be normal?
Regardless of the why behind our biases, what is clear is that it is a bias because two conflicting levels of verbosity indicates irrationality.
When you analyze it logically, it's by far easier to read english than it is to read a programming language even by a programming expert. Therefore the verbosity level of english must be the level of verbosity that is baseline for humans to have the most clarity in a single read.
This means that in general variable names are not verbose enough in programming.