[plt-scheme] Re: Naming style

Hi Will,

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 6:24 PM, Will Duquette <will at wjduquette.com> wrote:
> On Feb 14, 4:13 pm, Grant Rettke <gret... at acm.org> wrote:
>> I have heard people explain that when they use dynamically typed
>> languages they prefer more verbose procedure names because it makes it
>> easier to "refactor" their code.
>
> I'm not questioning the verbosity; I'm questioning defining umpteen
> functions when one function with two or three keyword arguments would
> do the same work.  The umpteen functions are no doubt simpler and
> easier to understand in isolation--but when you've got a swarm of
> them, it seems to me that you end up with more to understand.  I agree
> that using just "append" instead of, say, "hc-append", is probably a
> bad idea; "append" is too generic.

My reply was an answer to yours. One reason to have N append functions
rather than 1 is that it makes it easier to search for uses of it in
your code. I wouldn't say that N functions are easier to understand or
not; just that they are easier to search for ;).