When is a function name too long?

Question

I try to be rather descriptive with my function names, where possible. This occasionally results in function names in the twenty to thirty character range such as \"GetActionFr

Answer 1

Ask yourself a more interesting question: Why do we make function names long? It's in order to describe what the function does. Well, I submit this hypothesis:

The amount of description necessary in a function name is inversely proportional to the amount of type information available for it.

To illustrate the point, if you saw a function like this...

public  A id(A a);

...what would you think it does? The type information tells you everything you need to know. Barring side-effects and exceptions, there is only one thing that this function could possibly do.

Of course, you are probably working in a language that allows unfettered side-effects, so that function could, say, write to a file. But if it does then its type is a lie. Working in a language that declares effects in types allows you to use very terse names without any loss of descriptiveness.