Bob Nystrom:
What I want to talk about is something I see in a lot of code that drives me up the wall: identifiers that are too damn long.
Yes, names can be too short. Back when C only required external identifiers to be unique up to the first six characters; auto-complete hadn’t been invented; and every keypress had to be made uphill, in the snow, both ways; it was a problem. I’m glad we now live in a futuristic utopia where keyboard farts like p, idxcrpm, and x3 are rare.
But the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. We shouldn’t be Hemingway, but we don’t need to be Tennessee Williams either. Very long names also hurt the clarity of the code where they are used. Giant identifiers dwarf the operations you’re performing on them, are hard to visually scan, and force extra line breaks which interrupt the flow of the code.
A collection of great advice.