On Sat, May 5, 2018 at 3:08 AM, Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com> wrote:

Richard Sargent wrote
> No. Please, really no.

As much as I appreciate (and share) the passion for Smalltalk, you did not
AFAICT address my reasoning for not applying the no-acronym *guideline* in
this case, namely:

>> Since the argument IIUC is that "a
>> general user won't know the domain well enough to understand the
>> acronym",
>> would they understand "abstractSyntaxTree"?! That, to me, is as opaque as
>> the acronym for one not acquainted with the domain, and may buy us little
>> at the cost of a good amount of extra typing.

I care a lot less about typing than reading. Some years ago, a colleague of mine conducted a brief and informal survey of the developers working in our team. "What fraction of time do you spend reading code versus writing code?" Some people answered 50:50. In effect, saying that for every method they read, they wrote a new one!

The truth is that we all spend substantially more time reading than writing. Consequently, we need to emphasize how we communicate to readers. Alan Knight said it best: (paraphrasing) Trust the implementation does what it says it does. (In other words, message names should do what they say they do without creating the need to look inside the method to understand it.)
��

Richard Sargent wrote
> a disambiguation page with a lengthy list

IMHO this is irrelevant. My proposal included a method comment, which would
provide the google-able term, as well as potentially a good enough summary
that one wouldn't have to leave the image. The fact that the method belongs
to CompiledMethod is the disambiguation. The internet is meaningless and
flat compared to the context and structure of a ST image.

Richard Sargent wrote
> Do not use comments embedded *inside* methods to cover for naming the
> method badly�� Also, if one Googles an acronym

How is a harder-to-type thing that the user doesn't understand but is easier
to google better than a comment that gives the necessary context right in
the image? My ideal image would avoid the need to Google as much as
possible, suggesting a comment either way, so nothing lost. There's nothing
inherently "bad" about an acronym. For example, no one's been banging down
the door to rename "JPEGReadWriter" to
"JointPhotographicExpertsGroupReadWriter". In that case, it's because the
acronym is so well-known, but what I'm asking whether #ast is a similar
candidate for exception because it is so unknown (i.e. compiler
domain-specific) that a user is likely to know either the term and the
acronym or neither.

The thing is that a well named concept doesn't need Googling in order to have at least some understanding of its meaning. I would be willing to bet that, even if you had never heard of the topic before, you would have some idea what the phrase abstract syntax tree meant. Conversely, the first time one might encounter the concept presented as "ast", you might suspect it was a kind of snake. I'm being a bit extreme here, of course.

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Cheers,
Sean
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Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html