29 Mar
2016
29 Mar
'16
2:12 a.m.
On 25/03/2016 16:43, Aharon Robbins wrote:
... and I once heard an old-timer growl at a young programmer "I've
written boot loaders that were shorter than your variable names!"
Steve
I have long theorized that the reason for the
short names is that since
typing was so physically demanding, it was natural to make the command
names (and all the rest) be short and easier to type. I don't know if
this was a conscious decision, but I suspect it more likely to have been
an unconscious / natural one.
In a paper we will present at this year's International Conference on
Software Engineering we show (among other things) that the mean length
of identifiers in Unix C source code has risen from 3.5 to 7.5
characters from 1973 until today. We also observed a corresponding rise
in the length of lines and files. Better terminals can be one reason for
this rise. Other possible reasons may be increased software complexity
as well as CPU power and memory that allowed the processing of more
verbose code.
I've uploaded a preprint at
http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2016-ICSE-ProgEvol/html/SLK16.pdf