On 2019-11-30 05:28, Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas wrote:
On Nov 29, 2019, at 02:42, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
Programming uses lots of initialisms, abbreviations and hybrid words,
such as:
os ram ssd dir json xml len chr EOF I/O rlcompleter pprint sqlite
etc, and loads is not particularly worse than the rest.
I agree with your sentiment; and I’m -1 on the change, but it’s worth pointing
out that the amount of abbreviation and portmanteuing that’s considered
appropriate has changed over the years. The names Guido gave things in 1991
aren’t necessarily the names he’d come up with today; if he were inventing
`loads` 28 years later, I think he would have called it `load_string`. And, if
not, he would have changed his mind during the bikeshedding process when 80% of
the people paying attention argued against it.
It’s not even that people have decided that reading code is more important than
writing it (or that the novice learning curve matters), After all, sometimes
brevity is better for reading, too. So there’s still a balance. It’s just that
the balance in the 70s was based on reading and writing on slow teletypes where
you had to fit your program into a few KB, while now you have all the screen
space and storage you could want and instantaneous auto-complete and so on, so
the cost of longer names is a lot lower. And, while Python isn’t quite _that_
old, the balance in Python 0.9 was about fitting in with C in a Unix-ish
system, while now Python is about being good for everything from scripts to
servers. That’s why we usually get names like `get_current_loop` today instead
of names like `getcwd`. (But not always—e.g., new additions to `math` that wrap
or emulate `math.h` functions still get C-style names.)
I wouldn't like it if the names got too long. I find a certain amount of
abbreviation makes it easier to read in the long run.
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