One of the many things that I really like about Clojure is that it abandoned Lisp tradition where it was pragmatic to do so. One of the prime examples for me was the use of first and rest rather than car and cdr. Sure, I can read code with car and cdr but it never really communicated that well; I always had to go through a translation step in my head. With this in mind it surprises me ( and disappoints a little ) that there are still abbreviated function names in many places - aget, aset, assoc, conj, coll?, comp, and so on. Is there any need for this in the 21st century? The trade off between meaningful method names and number of characters typed doesn't seem to be a good one from my perspective; particularly as IDE support matures and you will only need to type 'asso' to have the IDE expand the function name to 'associate' for you. Using full words as function names leads to more readable code .. which can only be a good thing.
I'm not suggesting that terseness is bad, merely that I don't believe the trade off is worth it in this case. I've shown Clojure to a number of people and the Lisp derived syntax coupled with abridged names makes it harder for people to comprehend, makes it less likely that on first encountering a piece of Clojure code that they'll be able to understand it, and so make it less likely that I'll get to write Clojure for a living ... which makes me sad. Just some thoughts. Rob Lally. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
