On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 at 07:10, Jerry Kott <jk...@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
[image: image.png]

Reply via email to