On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 1:03 PM, Mark Murphy/STAR BASE Consulting Inc.
<mmurphy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yet, even for those who know RPG, SLL is mostly meaningless, the RPG keyword is SETLL. Similarly RDN is equally meaningless as READ or READE is the RPG equivalent.
As I said, I don't think I would have made all the same choices as the
author did. However, I think almost everyone who is responding is not
giving it a fair shake.
I'm sure we all like to believe we are not fearful of new things, or
predisposed to dislike the unfamiliar. But I think most of us are
anyway. I know I am.
If we look at this with an open mind for a second: Just think: How
long will it take you to learn that SLL means "set lower limit"? No,
really think about this. I don't consider myself a stunningly good
programmer or anything, but it literally took me just a few seconds to
learn this. I don't think I'm going to forget this one, and I
certainly am not going to confuse it with some other function when I
see it.
Other names in the package could well take longer to stick or be less
intuitive. But SLL was not a great first example of something to
complain about. It's a knee-jerk reaction, not a thoughtful one.
The other issue I have with this library is that even though the concepts of lists and trees are well established the vocabulary in this library is brand new, and this could put off guys with a different background. What would be wrong with rm_insert(), rm_get() and rm_remove()?
Well, first of all, rm_get() *is* one of the function names.
And the vocabulary you're proposing *is* there, just spelled shorter,
as rm_ins() and rm_rmv().
Let's see, how long will it take to learn that INS means "insert" and
RMV means "remove"? Cryptic? These three fundamental functions were
purposely kept at three letters each. I wonder if any of us has ever
been exposed to an environment that has pervasive three-letter
mnemonic abbreviations for words within commands. Hmm... I wonder....
John Y.
midrange.com
