Re: Long names are doom ?

[John English <je@brighton.ac.uk>]

Roedy Green wrote:
> There is a general rule though, that a terser program makes it easier
> to see the big picture.  You can get more of it on screen at once.
> Use of smaller methods so can easily see the whole flow of a method in
> a single screen full, without getting bogged in too much detail,
> really helps.

I agree that you should be able to see a whole unit (method, function,
whatever) on a single screen/page, but making the code "terser" just
means you can get twice as much stuff in the same space, so there's
twice as much complexity to absorb and it's twice as cryptic too.
The answer isn't terseness, it's abstraction. It's about breaking
things into bite-sized modules, not trying to cram as much stuff
as possible into an arbitrarily-chosen amount of space. Otherwise,
you could achieve a similar effect by removing unnecessary white
space (i.e. indentation and line breaks), which otherwise "wastes" 
about 50% of the available screen area in most programs...

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