Package-local nicknames

What follows is an opinion. Do not under any circumstances read it. Other opinions are available (but wrong).

Package-local nicknames are an abomination. They should be burned with nuclear fire, and their ashes launched into space on a trajectory which will leave the Solar System.

The only reason why package-local nicknames matter is if you are writing a lot of code with lots of package-qualified names in it. If you are doing that then you are writing code which is hard to read: the names in your code are longer than they need to be and the first several characters of them are package name noise (people read, broadly from left to right). Imagine me:a la:version ge:of oe:English oe:where la:people wrote like that: it’s just horrible. If you are writing code which is hard to read you are writing bad code.

Instead you should do the work to construct a namespace in which the words you intend to use are directly present. This means constructing suitable packages: the files containing the package definitions are then almost the only place where package names occur, and are a minute fraction of the total code. Doing this is a good practice in itself because the package definition file is then a place which describes just what names your code needs, from where, and what names it provides. Things like conduit packages (shameless self-promotion) can help with this, which is why I wrote them: being able to say ‘this package exports the combination of the exports of these packages, except …’ or ‘this package exports just the following symbols from these packages’ in an explicit way is very useful.

If you are now rehearsing a litany of things that can go wrong with this approach in rare cases¹, please don’t: this is not my first rodeo and, trust me, I know about these cases. Occasionally, the CL package system can make it hard or impossible to construct the namespace you need, with the key term here being being occasionally: people who give up because something is occasionally hard or impossible have what Erik Naggum famously called ‘one-bit brains’²: the answer is to get more bits for your brain.

Once you write code like this then the only place package-local nicknames can matter is, perhaps, the package definition file. And the only reason they can matter there is because people think that picking a name like ‘XML’ or ‘RPC’ or ‘SQL’ for their packages is a good idea. When people in the programming section of my hollowed-out-volcano lair do this they are … well, I will not say, but my sharks are well-fed and those things on spikes surrounding the crater are indeed their heads.

People should use long, unique names for packages. Java, astonishingly, got this right: use domains in big-endian order (org.tfeb.conduit-packages, org.tfeb.hax.metatronic). Do not use short nicknames. Never use names without at least one dot, which should be reserved for implementations and perhaps KMP-style substandards. Names will now not clash. Names will be longer and require more typing, but this will not matter because the only place package names are referred to are in package definition files and in in-package forms, which are a minute fraction of your code.

I have no idea where or when the awful plague of using package-qualified names in code arose: it’s not something people used to do, but it seems to happen really a lot now. I think it may be because people also tend to do this in Python and other dotty languages, although, significantly, in Python you never actually need to do this if you bother, once again, to actually go to the work of constructing the namespace you want: rather than the awful

import sys

... sys.argv ...

...

sys.exit(...)

you can simply say

from sys import argv, exit

... argv ...

exit(...)

and now the very top of your module lets anyone reading it know exactly what functionality you are importing and from where it comes.

It may also be because the whole constructing namespaces thing is a bit hard. Yes, it is indeed a bit hard, but designing programs, of which it is a small but critical part, is a bit hard.

OK, enough.

If, after reading the above, you think you should mail me about how wrong it all is and explain some detail of the CL package system to me: don’t, I do not want to hear from you. Really, I don’t.