Actual mathematical functions have some of the most useless, non-descriptive or vaguely metaphorical names going, so I'm not sure promoting an isomorophism with FP is a good thing. Examples: "bessel", "spherical_harmonic", "delta", "zeta"... Math is hard, and the terseness of mathematical notational conventions is one of the things that makes it so. Names that carry meaning with them are an aid to the naive user, and that is a good thing.
Secondly, naming a function "json" requires the user read the code or the comments to figure out what it does, and blocks the user of the name for anything else that returns json. Suppose rather than a string you have a list that you need translated to json... what do you name the function?
There are three levels of documenting code: naming, comments, and the code itself. Function names should be chosen such that other developers can reasonably guess at a glance what the function does, because the two most comon use-cases for names are:
1) reading someone else's code, where digging in to find out what "json" does is orders of magnitude more work than reading "json_from_string"
and
2) figuring out how to do something in a given codebase, where skimming over a list of function names and picking out one or two that look likely for deeper investigation is orders of magnitude faster than reading the docs or the code for every function to find out which obscurely-named function does the job you want.
Longer, more fully descriptive names aid the user in the excecution of these use cases.
> Secondly, naming a function "json" requires the user read the code or the comments to figure out what it does, and blocks the user of the name for anything else that returns json. Suppose rather than a string you have a list that you need translated to json... what do you name the function?
> Secondly, naming a function "json" requires the user read the code or the comments to figure out what it does, and blocks the user of the name for anything else that returns json. Suppose rather than a string you have a list that you need translated to json... what do you name the function?
This is exactly what functional programming seeks to solve. This should be the same function. Every language that has the power to do FP has the ability to do multi-functions or pattern matching just for this kind of situation.
Secondly, naming a function "json" requires the user read the code or the comments to figure out what it does, and blocks the user of the name for anything else that returns json. Suppose rather than a string you have a list that you need translated to json... what do you name the function?
There are three levels of documenting code: naming, comments, and the code itself. Function names should be chosen such that other developers can reasonably guess at a glance what the function does, because the two most comon use-cases for names are:
1) reading someone else's code, where digging in to find out what "json" does is orders of magnitude more work than reading "json_from_string"
and
2) figuring out how to do something in a given codebase, where skimming over a list of function names and picking out one or two that look likely for deeper investigation is orders of magnitude faster than reading the docs or the code for every function to find out which obscurely-named function does the job you want.
Longer, more fully descriptive names aid the user in the excecution of these use cases.