I recently started studying functional programming using Haskell and came upon this article on the official Haskell wiki: How to read Haskell.
The article claims that short variable names such as x, xs, and f are fitting for Haskell code, because of conciseness and abstraction. In essence, it claims that functional programming is such a distinct paradigm that the naming conventions from other paradigms don't apply.
What are your thoughts on this?
In a functional programming paradigm, people usually construct abstractions not only top-down, but also bottom-up. That means you basically enhance the host language. In this kind of situations I see terse naming as appropriate. The Haskell language is already terse and expressive, so you should be kind of used to it.
However, when trying to model a certain domain, I don't believe succinct names are good, even when the function bodies are small. Domain knowledge should reflect in naming.
Just my opinion.
I'll take two code snippets from Real World Haskell, both from chapter 3.
In the section named "A more controlled approach", the authors present a function that returns the second element of a list. Their final version is this:
tidySecond :: [a] -> Maybe a
tidySecond (_:x:_) = Just x
tidySecond _ = Nothing
The function is generic enough, due to the type parameter a and the fact we're acting on a built in type, so that we don't really care what the second element actually is. I believe x is enough in this case. Just like in a little mathematical equation.
On the other hand, in the section named "Introducing local variables", they're writing an example function that tries to model a small piece of the banking domain:
lend amount balance = let reserve = 100