Re: About Emacs Modernisation Project

[pjb@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)]

Maarten Bergvelt <bergv@math.uiuc.edu> writes:

> On 2010-06-01, LanX <lanx.perl@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> But the lack of namespaces leads to very long names which IMHO
>> irritate newbies.
>> [...]
>> Snippets manipulating different aspects of font-lock would look less
>> intimidating, without the need to repeat "font-lock-" 20 times.
>
> Have you discovered the tab-key? I am an incompetent 2 finger typer,
> but with emacs I am pretty fast, as I can use all kinds of automatic
> completions. 
>
> Having long identifiers makes them easier to understand, and only
> slightly harder to input.

I've got the impression (this of course would need experimental
input), that psychologically it's better indeed to have short names.
It's not a question of typing them, with or without completion; we
read much more than we write, usually.

If long names weren't a psychological problem there wouldn't be so
many acronyms, and even most of the words in our "natural" languages
are nothing but acronyms or abreviations, if you're to believe Edo
Nyland's theory.

http://www.linguistic-archaeology.eu/
http://www.amazon.com/Linguistic-Archaeology-Introduction-Edo-Nyland/dp/1552126684
Summary: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/nytheory.htm


Of course, short names lead to overloading, hence the need for
context.  Happily, our brains work marvellously on contextual data.
This is what Common Lisp packages are and define: a context for the
names used in programs.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com