Re:A Year in Clojure
by ken on Sunday October 07, 2018 @10:32AM
(#18160712)
> After writing the 10,000th unit test that only exists to ensure that you spelled some function/method/hash-key correctly, it gets a little tiresome.
One of the things I liked about Lisp when I first saw it was that, since it uses kebab-case and (usually) full words, I could just turn on my standard English spell-checker. After all, if "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute", then it makes sense that I should be able to run a normal spell-checker on them. The only reason that was infeasible in languages like C is because they used (for both technical and cultural reasons) names like "memcpy".
Whatever field I'm working in already has its own vocabulary. I don't need to create a new <domain>-in-<proglang> vocabulary for a program about it. Or if I do invent an abbreviation that's so useful that I want to use it in my source code, I'll probably also want to use it in my documentation, webpage, emails, etc.
Most large programs that I've worked on, in other languages, have at least a couple misspellings in func/var names, which even Haskell's type system won't catch. "Referer" was clearly not written by someone with their spell-checker turned on for source code!
One of the things I liked about Lisp when I first saw it was that, since it uses kebab-case and (usually) full words, I could just turn on my standard English spell-checker. After all, if "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute", then it makes sense that I should be able to run a normal spell-checker on them. The only reason that was infeasible in languages like C is because they used (for both technical and cultural reasons) names like "memcpy".
Whatever field I'm working in already has its own vocabulary. I don't need to create a new <domain>-in-<proglang> vocabulary for a program about it. Or if I do invent an abbreviation that's so useful that I want to use it in my source code, I'll probably also want to use it in my documentation, webpage, emails, etc.
Most large programs that I've worked on, in other languages, have at least a couple misspellings in func/var names, which even Haskell's type system won't catch. "Referer" was clearly not written by someone with their spell-checker turned on for source code!