Re: Long names are doom ?

[Jon Skeet <skeet@pobox.com>]

Wes Groleau <wwgrol@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com> wrote:

> > No-one said anything about *depending* on a convention. *Encouraging* a
> 
> I believe someone DID say

Any references? I can't remember seeing it.

> > It helps people to understand the code *without* prior familiarity with the
> 
> > convention is a different matter, and in fact almost all experienced
> > Java programmers I know of *do* seem to follow the conventions, to a
> > greater or lesser extent.
> 
> The eleven people that attended the same Java class I did are not following
> this convention unless someone took them aside afterward and explained it to
> them.  

If they were attending a Java class, I *suspect* I wouldn't call them 
experienced Java programmers.

The more experienced you get, the more other people's code you read - 
and as almost all the code you read (especially Sun's, obviously) use 
the same conventions, it makes sense to adopt them. It helps not to have 
to remember where you got a package from in order to easily work out 
what the methods are likely to be called.

> A written coding, naming, or commenting convention for encoding essential
> information that can't be enforced (or isn't) is at best useless (because
> you know you can't depend on it and at worst disastrous (because someone
> will depend on it when its wrong).

No, at best it's very helpful, as it means I can read other people's 
code faster than I would if they didn't follow the same convention as I 
do.

In the middle it's reasonably helpful, as if someone uses *a* convention 
but it's not the same as me, then I can get to grips with their 
convention then I can learn to read their code quickly too.

The worst situation is when someone doesn't follow a convention *at 
all*, changing capitalisation etc at a whim - at that stage, you have to 
look up method names etc every time you want to use them.

> Any convention, enforced or not, for encoding information that is not
> important is increasing the chance of being distracted from what IS
> important.

So you believe that

package TeST;class SHowArGS{public static void main (String[]ARgS){for
(int SOMeThINg=0;SOMeThINg<ARgs.length;SOMeThINg++)System.out.println
(ARgS[SOMeThINg]);}}

is *more* likely to create distraction than:

package test;

class ShowArguments
{
    public static void main (String [] args)
    {
        for (int i=0; i < args.length; i++)
            System.out.println (args[i]);
    }
}

Sorry, but I think that's crazy.

-- 
Jon Skeet - skeet@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~skeet
If replying to the group, please don't mail me at the same time