As far as I know, every code complexity metric ever divised treats all identifiers equally. After all, they're all just opaque strings to the computer, right?<\/p>\n
But complexity metrics are not designed for the benefit of computers - they're designed for people, to try to make the code less complex and easier for people to understand (otherwise we could just measure the length of the generated binary code).<\/p>\n
And there is certainly something less complex about a variable called \"cost\" than a variable called \"amountPaidPerItemInDollars\" for example - a program using the second should surely be considered more complex than an otherwise identical program using the first, right?<\/p>\n
On the other hand, one doesn't necessarily want to count all the letters in an identifier to measure its complexity - that would just lead to very cryptic or meaningless 1 and 2 letter variable names.<\/p>\n
I think the answer is to divide identifiers up into words (in case sensitive languages by starting each word with a capital letter, and in non-case-sensitive languages by separating words with underscores). Each word counts for one point and should be a real word in the English language, or defined elsewhere in the program as a sequence of other words (perhaps with a special comment that the compexlity measurer can understand). So, for example, instead of having a lot of variables containing the characters hyperTextMarkupLanguage, one would have a glossary section in one's program saying \"html == hyper text markup language\" and then treat \"html\" itself as a word.<\/p>\n
Making up terminology is an important part of programming, and one that I think is often overlooked. Giving a decent (appropriate, one word) name to each of the important concepts in your program from the get-go, and giving each of these terms a precise meaning (even if some details of those meanings change as the program evolves) causes one to be able to think about these concepts more clearly. It also leads to easier and more consistent naming of variables and types.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As far as I know, every code complexity metric ever divised treats all identifiers equally. After all, they're all just opaque strings to the computer, right? But complexity metrics are not designed for the benefit of computers - they're designed for people, to try to make the code less complex and easier for people to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":913,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions\/913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}