Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Variable naming conventions

There is an ongoing debate regarding the ideal length for variables and type names in Go programs. On one hand, there are the proponents of the belief that all variables should have clear and self-descriptive names. This is a fairly common philosophy for people who have spent some time authoring code in the Java ecosystem. On the other side of the fence, we have the minimalists, that is, people who advocate for shorter identifier names, arguing that longer identifiers are too verbose.

The Go language authors certainly seem to be members of the latter camp. Case in point, here is the definition of two of the most popular Go interfaces: io.Reader and io.Writer:

type Reader interface {
    Read(p []byte) (n int, err ...