4 ms·
I am not sure that fst and snd decreases readability. There was studies that showed that at least for alphabetic languages humans recognized words by the first
by _0w8t 4y ago
I am not sure that fst and snd decreases readability. There was studies that showed that at least for alphabetic languages humans recognized words by the first and last characters initially ignoring the middle. So these abbreviations nicely play on that.
- epolanski 4y agoIt's still mental overhead for a subset of users, thus an unnecessary shortening.
- dfinninger 4y agoI read “snd” as “send”. I also read “fst“ as “fast”. Word length also matters.
- bmitc 4y agoThat’s probably a stretch because the study is probably more about the brain being able to fill in if needed rather than it being the same cognitive load. There’s no point in testing the brain in a programming language, and as far as I can tell, programmers are really the only ones that are obsessed with word length. It’s as if authors would just shorten “the” to “th” or “t” since it repeats a lot.