Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, March 08, 2012 20:42:31 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 07:07:43PM -0500, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > On Thursday, March 08, 2012 12:10:07 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > > IMO, making all abbreviations in Phobos consistent would be a big
> > > step forward.
> > 
> > You know, people keep saying that the abbreviations are inconsistent,
> > but I don't buy that. _What_ abbreviations are inconsistent?
> 
> [...]
> 
> My comment was referring specifically to the pull request that adds
> "secs" as an alternative for "seconds". From what Walter said, he seems
> to be against any renaming changes, so any existing inconsistencies that
> we might find seems likely to be rejected as well.
> 
> But at the end of the day, this *is* just bikeshedding, so perhaps it's
> not worth spending so much time and energy on. People will get used to
> the quirky names eventually, and life goes on. *shrug*

I think that most of the major issues with inconsistencies have been fixed. 
Sure, there may be a few left, but the longer that they're there, the more 
costly it is to fix them. And D is reaching the point where it needs to be 
stable. Constantly tweaking the standard library just doesn't cut it. I made 
quite a few changes to try and fix inconsistencies (such as function names 
which weren't camelcased like they were supposed to be), and that was painful 
enough, and engendered plenty of complaints in spite of the fact that there 
were quite a few people arguing for fixing the names to make Phobos consistent.

I really don't think that Phobos is really any more quirky or inconsistent 
than your average standard library. It's not perfect, but it isn't 
particularly inconsistent either. We'll continue to make improvement to it 
(primarily by adding new stuff), but it's increasingly costly to make breaking 
changes. And, on the whole, it's not like what we have is horrible. The 
biggest problems involve whole modules (which are generally older) which need 
to be redesigned, and those will happen. But minor stuff like tweaking function 
names doesn't really buy us enough to be worth it anymore. If a function 
changes sufficiently to merit a full replacement, then maybe we can change its 
name and phase out the old one (e.g. if we change the functions in std.string 
which take patterns to take regexes instead), but changing a name to change a 
name just isn't worth it when we're trying to provide a serious offering with D 
and Phobos. We're too far along.

- Jonathan M Davis