- shortnames should be banned: cholfact for instance might be replaced by choleskyfactorization. Using shortnames without word separation is just a nightmare. And it's not because Matlab is a mess regarding this matter that Julia should imitate it.
I assume that name came from some Matlab or Numpy user. I think the more Julian might be to write this as `factorize(Cholesky, ...)` where Cholesky happens to also be the return type in this case, but also could have been a singleton type. Part of the push to use names without underscores is to encourage users to choose names that are actually just a single word (or at most two, like the is••• methods). If you feel the method needs to have a name of does_this_and_that, it's often true that either you could have made two methods (this and that), or eliminated one of the descriptors by utilizing multiple dispatch (see the recent change from parse_•••(x) to parse(•••,x) for example) On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 1:29 PM François Fayard <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't want to ban any Julia user from using underscores in a name. But I > think it would be nice to have consistency in the naming convention of the > standard library. I've seen that a lot of names come from Matlab and Matlab > happen to be (this is my advice) the worst thing that happen to the > scientific community in terms of langage and naming conventions. > > But you may be right. Having the consistency of a tool such as Mathematica > might be something that's hard to reproduce in an open source project. It's > sad, because it is something that I do value a lot. For instance, I do work > on C++ projects where I am alone and I am using C++ coding guidelines. > > That's why it should be nice to have a good "coding guideline" that is > enforced across the Julia standard library, especially for naming > convention. > > On Sunday, April 26, 2015 at 5:27:44 PM UTC+2, Tamas Papp wrote: > >> I am not sure that "banning" naming conventions is feasible in an open >> source context. Also, as Scott Jones pointed out, the documentation >> itself is not consistent. >> >> I prefer underscores, and I guess I will continue using them wherever >> they make sense. Perhaps people could file an issues about very >> abbreviated names, but IMO cholfact is OK. Naming functions is more of >> an art than a science; style guides are useful but do not necessarily >> lead to unambigous rules. >> >> Best, >> >> Tamas >> >> On Sun, Apr 26 2015, François Fayard <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> > I tend to prefer names with underscores, but the Julia team has decided >> to >> > use names without underscores. I don't want to change that but, I think >> > many things need to be fixed: >> > - shortnames should be banned: cholfact for instance might be replaced >> by >> > choleskyfactorization. Using shortnames without word separation is just >> a >> > nightmare. And it's not because Matlab is a mess regarding this matter >> that >> > Julia should imitate it. >> > - underscores should be banned: we need consistency, and there are >> places >> > with underscores, some without. We could keep underscores for functions >> > that do 2 things. >> > >> > Consistency is of uttermost importance in a langage with a lot of >> functions >> > in the standard library. >> >
