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Comment by Davidzheng | Hacker News Reader

If you have to write complete inner product space a hundred times in an article that's pretty annoying tbh

In a Physics article, we'd just call it CIPS after the first instance. It does get a bit unwieldy if there are too many acronyms or initialisms in a sentence.

Terrible excuse. Things are read much more than they are written. That’s like using short variable names rather than descriptive ones as they are easier to type. With current IDEs that isn’t even the case and I’m sure word processors could use the same autocomplete. Every writing shortcut adds cognitive load for the reader to remember.

Short variable names can be easier to read, too. Having people decode meaning from the name, rather than keeping track of the meaning separately and associating it with a symbolic name, doesn't always feel like a good use of cognitive resources.

imo, "Hilbert space" is a lot easier to read, you really only have to recognize the guy's name, it's a fairly easily recognizable word. "Complete inner product space" has me look more closely at more words, and it's all extremely boring-looking words so they don't even stand out in a block of text.

I mean long class names in Java in particular are pretty much a meme [1] because of how ridiculous they are. There is definitely a balance to be struck between succinctness and expressiveness.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3215736

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