code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD

[Kent-Dorfman]

Why are modern coders, as a group, always so enamored with writing extremely verbose code?...I have an extremely short attention span...ie A.D.D...LOL
Unfortunately that is a common "problem" with modern day coders, the impression that verbosity is somehow superior. Think Readers Digest condensed version, not full novel. Sometimes I really miss FORTRAN. LOL

The argument against 20...30...40 character identifiers: USE SMALLER SCOPE!!! Nothing bugs my OCD more than seeing a 30+ character variable or type name listed over and over again...often with a single word in the middle of it transposed to something else.

I wonder whether subconsciously coders feel that they are being graded on how verbose they can be...Hey guys...you get more kudos from me by writing the most elegant and concise code you can that doesn't introduce side-effects.

If you want to be verbose then do it in comments, not code...code does NOT replace proper use of inline commenting.

[JonB]

@Kent-Dorfman
Things have gone downhill since small computers had more than a few K of memory for programs to fit into, and you could afford to have long variable names, and comments.

[Kent-Dorfman]

I don't understand. In the BASIC interpretter world your comments ended up in RAM, but in modern well-endowed machines it all compiles to the same machine code...My point of contention is that modern devs seem to favor ridiuclously verbose machine instructions, over good solid internal commenting of code.

At a previous job it wasn't uncommon to see 200+ lines of long winded deeply nested shared memory structure names, and verbose field names, where often a single word in the middle of the struct name may be changed...I got yelled at because I refactored one such section of code to use shorthand pointers to the records so I only had to worry about the field names.

ie

ApActiveAvionicsDisplayPower->CurrentLoadAmps

became

auto ptr=ApActiveAvionicsDisplayPower;
ptr->PreviousLoadAmps = ptr->CurrentLoadAmps;
ptr->CurrentLoadAmps = 0.0;

and the like

[JonB]

@Kent-Dorfman said in code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD:

I don't understand

It was only meant humorously :)

[J.Hilk]

@Kent-Dorfman

to be honest, I like to read my code as a text/novel from left to right, so you understand exactly what is happening while reading it

take this function for example

void resendPendingDatagram()
{
    if(retryCount() < maxNumberOfRetries()){
            setRetryCount(retryCount() +1);
    
            m_pendingDatagram.clearResponseBuffer();
            sendDatagram(m_pendingDatagram);
        } else {
            stopTimeouts();
    
            setError(tr("All retries exhausted"), MceDiscardedDatagram);
        }
}

obviously very verbose naming of members and functions. but just from reading left to right top to bottom spelling symbols out, you get a comprehensive description of what is happening.

If the retry count is less then the max number of retries*, then* increase the retry count by one, clear the response buffer and resend the pending datagram
else (if not) stop the timeouts and set an error

Obviously its not perfect, but I try :D

And in my opinion, much clearer than auto ptr, int count, i, m_data etc

obviously I agree, that ApActiveAvionicsDisplayPower and similar is not that helpful as a name

[jsulm]

@J-Hilk Yes, I also like names for variables, methods and classes which tell you what it is about. There is no problem to use short names in some cases (like "i" in a for loop), but else it is better to write easy to understand code. Code is read more often than written, so it is more important to write understandable code than having short names.

[JKSH]

@jsulm said in code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD:

it is more important to write understandable code than having short names.

+1

The ideal is to be "easy to read" and "easy to understand", not to be "verbose".

• Too short => Difficult to read
• Too long => Difficult to read
• Just right => Easy to read

@Kent-Dorfman said in code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD:

a 30+ character variable or type name listed over and over again...often with a single word in the middle of it transposed to something else.

This sounds horribly difficult to read. I wouldn't want to work on such a code base

[JonB]

@JKSH said in code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD:

Too short => Difficult to read
Too long => Difficult to read
Just right => Easy to read

Reminds me of "Goldilocks", "The Three Bears" and "porridge" :) Do you have this tale in Europe?

[J.Hilk]

@JonB sure, Goldlöckchen und die drei Bären here in Germany, but we don't have the same phrase for a goldilocks zone resulting from the tale :D

[KroMignon]

@JonB said in code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD:

Do you have this tale in Europe?

It France it is called "Boucle d'Or et les trois oursons" ;)
AFAIK, it is a britisch/scottish fairy tale.

[JonB]

@KroMignon said in code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD:

AFAIK, it is a britisch/scottish fairy tale.

Well that might explain "porridge", I don't know whether you really eat that stuff in Germany/France but one certainly does in Scotland!

Having said that, I was under the impression that basically all fairy tales came from Europe (Germany/Eastern), I didn't think we really invented any here... :) (And I think it has been a long time since we have had any bears in the British Isles!)

[jsulm]

@JonB said in code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD:

it has been a long time since we have had any bears in the British Isles

Just wanted to ask that :-)

[JonB]

@jsulm
Our largest non-herbivore is basically the fox! :)

[KroMignon]

@JonB said in code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD:

Our largest non-herbivore is basically the fox! :)

Aha, this made me remember this: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

Often used to check communication protocols and/or display :D

[JonB]

@KroMignon
You do/Do you realise this phrase was chosen (I believe in typewriter days) as (just about the shortest, meaningful) sentence holding all 26 letters of the alphabet?

[KroMignon]

@JonB said in code verbosity severely bugs my ADD and OCD:

You do/Do you realise this phrase was chosen (I believe in typewriter days) as (just about the shortest, meaningful) sentence holding all 26 letters of the alphabet?

Yes of course, this is why I used to check if all is working well ;)
But I must admit, this phrase was suggested by a British co-worker. It found it funny, so I used it often :)

[JonB]

@Kent-Dorfman
I am sorry, it is probably I who have hijacked your thread! Hope you don't mind.

Getting back to your original comment about the length of variable/symbol names. You might (or might not) be interested that when I started out in Unix System V.0 coding many years ago, at least external linker symbols (e.g. publicly visible global function names) were limited to 7 character significance! You could name a global function/variable with more characters if you wished, but they would be "chopped off" at the seventh character (actually to allow a maximum of 8 characters, because they would have an underscore character added at the beginning), and had to be distinct from any other global symbol within the first 7 characters, else clash error).

This led to severe required "abbreviation" of one's chosen function names! If you have ever wondered why C library functions had names like strncpy and not longer, this is the reason :)

Just as a separate by-the-by, filenames (per directory) were limited to 14 characters, so that with an additional 2 bytes/16 bits of file attributes/permissions (like drwxrwxrwx) every file name fitted into a convenient 16 bytes in the file system... :)

[J.Hilk]

If the company I currently worked for, would actually enforce the coding guidelines, I would be forced to name stuff like:
uint16_t u16_input_status = 0

I think I suddenly would find myself doing much more functional programming.

[JoeCFD]

You missed FORTRAN? It is so hard to maintain it. Actually, I hated it because of a lot of short names. Often it is painful to read someone else's code. And it introduced even class and this may kill itself. I am glad I switched to C++.

It is better to write code like a book. More readable, better to maintain it. I later realized that I should always think I am writing code for someone else, but for myself.

Who is writting a code alone nowadays?

.

[Kent-Dorfman]

I would then argue that the minions of mediocity have done well in convincing people to to think as marketers/writers intead of as engineers/mathematicians/scientists. Most of this same "identifers must be meaningful" drivvel is linked to code that severely lacks in internal inline documentation...as if somehow being wordy negates any responsibility to comment on what you're trying to accomplish...and as I stated before, pointy haired boss will be much more impressed with expressing a code idea in 1000 lines instead of 100. LOL

I mean why write this:

if (condition) {
   DoSomething();
} else {
   SomethingElse();
}

when you can make the reader scroll pages by doing:

if (condition) 
{
   DoSomething();
} 
else 
{
   SomethingElse();
}