What is it with functional languages and people naming their variables with single letters? If I wrote some python code like that I'd be laughed out of the room
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Everyone I know who programs with single letters comes from a graduate-level math background. There seems to be a kind of belief that elegance and compactness are desirable.
Of course it’s the polar opposite of self-documenting, legible, understandable, easy-to-maintain code.
Academic notation is much less concerned with self-documentation and much more concerned with brevity and correctness.
I'm glad we never needed to learn these forms in school:
horizontalDisplacement = -(linearCoefficient +- sqrt(linearCoefficient^2 - 4 x quadraticCoefficient x constantCoefficient)) / (2 x quadraticCoefficient)
triangle_hypotenuse_length^2 = triangle_vertical_length^2 + triangle_horizontal_length^2
>I'm glad we never needed to learn these forms in school:
I'm not. You vastly underestimate how much easier that is to read, especially for students in school.
I agree.
My first thought upon reading those was... my god, if that’s how I’d first learned it in 7th grade, it would have made so much more immediate, intuitive sense to me and the rest of the students!
We’re taught so many formulas where we don’t have the slightest intuitive idea of what the variables mean or the effect they have (unless we’re naturally really intuitively good at math, which only a very small proportion of students are).
But if they said it right in their name... that seriously would have been a game-changer for a lot of students, I think. A gigantic help for understanding how to connect formulas to practical word problems.
Because many of them, especially Haskell, have their roots in Mathematics which are famous for one letter variable names.
Because the syntax favours terseness for readabilities sake (to see structure and patterns rather than reading a description of the variable).
Because Python specifically favours verboseness and has many principles around using long names, underscores instead of camelcase and the like.
Fine, but that doesn't address the point GP is making. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, since I am constantly frustrated by the opaque nature of functional programming tutorials on the internet. Functional composition is very difficult for beginners to pick up, and using single letter variable names for everything significantly compounds that problem. There are many concepts in FP that can elevate the craft of software design, and it's a tragedy that a lack of approachable instructional materials convinces most programmers that either they are not smart enough to learn it, or that it's Ivory tower nonsense. Ease of readability is a virtue in any programming environment, and I personally feel that the FP community as a whole should make lowering the barriers to entry a top priority. I'm grateful to all of the people working hard to bring functional programming to the masses, but I have a sneaking suspicion that many functional programming practitioners like that it looks complex and difficult to outsiders. Just my two cents.