Avoid Overly Long Names [VS3]
- Edensoft Labs
Tip VS3
When names become too long, they can hinder readability. Make your names long enough, but consider opportunities for conciseness.
Longer, more specific names tend to be beneficial in making sure all necessary information can be communicated to a reader, but names that are longer than necessary may pose practical problems:
They can just take longer to read - more characters to scan across.
They take up more length on a line - while monitors now tend to be really wide with high screen resolutions, there’s still only a limited amount of screen space in which code can fit. You want to communicate the right amount of information within some given screen space.
Humans are limited in the number of things they can keep in their head at once. The more words in a variable name, the more a human has to keep in his/her head at once to get the full meaning of a variable. There’s a point where this can become overwhelming and infeasible.
The following example shows how an overly long name can be reduced:
