[laumars]

> Onboarding somebody into a world full of single-character variable names and such is a headache.

The opposite of named arguments isn’t single character variable names. Any organisation with an enforced coding standard would ensure that variables are descriptive irrespective of whether that language uses named arguments or not.

[DonaldPShimoda]

Yes, I agree! I was specifically addressing the parent comment's line about "I use a terse programming style." When it comes to functional programmers, they (more than any other group) will take terseness to the extreme in the form of single-letter variable names in inner functions, match forms, etc.

I didn't mean for my comment to be entirely literal, either. Rather, I just meant to say that terseness can impede readability for those who are not yet familiar with the codebase. (But I have personally been on the receiving end of onboarding into a codebase full of literal single-character names, which I found incredibly frustrating.)

[a1369209993]

> When it comes to functional programmers, they (more than any other group) will take terseness to the extreme

You should really read about APL and other array languages then. (I don't have a good starting point, but they tend to come up on HN periodically such as [0] [1]).

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23055793

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16847641

[implicit]

The right balance here can depend on the specific business you're working in.

Some companies earn the privilege of a super tenured core team of engineers who work on their product for an extended period of time. They will choose different tradeoffs from a team that needs to adapt to higher turnover.