On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 at 07:10, Jerry Kott <jkott@image-ware.com> wrote:
Interestingâ¦
I am curious about the purpose of this analysis (other than the âinteresting-nessâ of it). Sure, some names read like sentences, but that beats the âstrcpy()â, doesnât it? I love that in Smalltalk / Pharo, I donât have to remember cryptic function names and can make the code optimally verbose (if there is such a thing) to express intent. If that means a method is rather long, so be it.
Its an offshoot of working on the Pharo Track of the Exercism project ( https://exercism.io/tracks/pharo-smalltalk) Here we generate test-method names from their canonical data "description" ( https://github.com/exercism/problem-specifications/blob/master/exercises/wor... ) The original intent of that field was to generate identifiers, but sometimes the language ends up a bit flowery and we ended up with method-name 150 character long. I am in the process of slimming these down. Someone queried me "what was a recommended identifier length" and I had no clue -- so I thought the Pharo code base would be a good source of data. Having produced the graph, I thought others might find it mildly interesting. Thats all. It may be worthwhile reviewing some of the outliers, but that was not its intent. It was shared just-for-interest. The purpose is certainly not to squeeze Pharo messages down to 6 characters ;) cheers -ben P.S. I found the graph more useful showing percentages rather than absolute count. 95% less than 50 characters 99% less than 60 characters [image: image.png]
