On planning an evaluation of the impact of identifier names on the readability and quality of smalltalk programs

How do Scratch Programmers Name Variables and Procedures?

“…Naming identifiers in software code has been studied extensively in the past decades [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27]. In practice, identifiers constitute a major part of the source code: e.g., in Eclipse 3.0M7 which is tantamount to 2 MLoC, 33% of the tokens and 72% of characters correspond to identifiers [28].…”

“…For a human reading code, it is crucial to the understanding of code to also understand what the identifiers mean. As such, several studies have investigated the link between identifier naming and code readability and comprehension [2], [5], [24], [26], [27] or identifier naming and externally observable aspects of the software development process that are expected to be affected by comprehension such as change-proneness [1], quality [4], [6] and presence of faults [7], [8]. Caprile and Tonella [29] have observed that names of C functions consist of on average of 2.04-3.36 words, often verbs expressing action, while Caracciolo et al observed that most method names in Java and Smalltalk also tend to consist of several words but rarely more than five words [30].…”

“…The Scratch program in Fig. 3 consists of one sprite, the cat, which is Scratch's default sprite and logo 6 . The code in the sprite will cause the cat to jump up, say "hello", and come back down, when the green flag is clicked, and to make the 'meow' sound when the space bar is pressed.…”

“…The naming of identifiers in the source code has been extensively studied (see, e.g., recent studies of this subject [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]). Still, the impact of the variable name choice on code readability and maintainability is controversial, as witnessed, e.g., by recent studies of Beniamini et al [3] and Hofmeister et al [5] reaching contradictory conclusions.…”