Author here. I chose two real sets of commit messages rather than to fabricate one. Fabricating one may have made the second list easier to scan -- you'd alread

Author here. I chose two real sets of commit messages rather than to fabricate one. Fabricating one may have made the second list easier to scan -- you'd already know what you were looking for and you would have some familiarity with the content. In any case, it's certainly not a perfect experiment or demonstration. The specific function/variable names do not often make appearances in our commit messages (though they do sometimes, as do class names). They do, however, make very clear appearances in diffs. Commit messages stand on their own for their own purpose -- it's an index, and indexes are for scanning. If you need to read further, you zoom in. Also, I wasn't trying to say to "use longer sentences for everything," where did you get that from? I offered some specific clarifications on how we write some common commit messages, and they may be longer than some alternatives, but our reasons are for clarity and consistency. We don't mind slightly longer commit messages, in large part because the first few words tend to be the most important.