On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 at 07:10, Jerry Kott <jkott@image-ware.com> wrote:

Interesting��

I am curious about the purpose of this analysis (other than the ��interesting-ness�� of it). Sure, some names read like sentences, but that beats the ��strcpy()��, doesn��t it? I love that in Smalltalk / Pharo, I don��t 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/word-count/canonical-data.json)

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