On Monday, April 27, 2015 at 3:27:07 AM UTC-4, Christoph Ortner wrote: > > > A comment in **strong support** of the Julia naming convention: these are > just my personal impressions: > > I think in much of numerical analysis (and to some but lesser extent > scientific computing) overly short variable names are fairly popular, I > think because they represent a direct translation of algorithms or formulas > into code. I guess it never becomes a problem because codes or code blocks > tend to be short. Similarly, I like `cholfact`; it is completely clear what > is meant. While I'd be still ok with `cholesky_factorisation`, I think it > is unnecessary. >
An issue I have with the Julia community, is that many times it seems that people only see Julia as being important for the numerical computing community... and I think it could have much broader use... (yes, the introduction states that it is also for general computing, but that seems to be forgotten frequently...) How is `cholfact` completely clear to the general programming community? I bet most people, just seeing the name, would think it was some fact about "chol"... Same thing with the explanation of why * was used for string concatenation (that it screamed "not commutative"... but, I'd also bet, that at least 9 out of 10 college graduates would assure you that multiplication *was* commutative, and could point you to a ton of results on Google to back that up!) [I *do* understand that in matrix multiplication, a dot product is not commutative, but how many people, even well educated people, would know that...]) The name Cholesky looks like it might be something about a hole in the sky, actually ;-) `factorize(Cholesky, ...)` is overdoing it. This is again the mistake of > sacrificing simplicity of use for elegant language design. So far, Julia > has relatively few of those. >
