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2026-04-23 | 🔤 No Abbreviations in Haskell: A Boy-Scout Refactor 🧹

🎯 What We Did

🧹 This session applied the “boy-scout rule” — leave the code cleaner than you found it — by eliminating every abbreviated name from eight Haskell source files. 🔤 The engineering principle is simple: write full words for all function and variable names, because legibility is more important than brevity.

🔍 The Problem With Abbreviations

🗂️ The codebase had grown a collection of prefixed record field names like dsSeriesId, dsModelChain, bsrcPriorityUserEnvVar, seTaskId, and local variable shorthands like gc, initReq, si, pp, n, and initialBackoffUs. 😵 These names require the reader to maintain a mental decoding table just to understand what the code does. 📖 Self-documenting code should speak for itself.

📋 The Changes

🏗️ The refactor touched twelve files across four layers of the codebase.

📦 In BlogSeriesDiscovery.hs, all ds-prefixed fields on DiscoveredSeries and rc-prefixed fields on RawConfig were renamed to their full descriptive counterparts. 📦 In Scheduler.hs, all bsrc-prefixed fields on BlogSeriesRunConfig and se-prefixed fields on ScheduleEntry were similarly cleaned up. 📦 In Gemini.hs, local variables like gc, initReq, and si became config, parsedRequest, and instruction. 📦 In InternalLinking/Gemini.hs, initialBackoffUs and maxBackoffUs became initialBackoffMicroseconds and maxBackoffMicroseconds. 📦 In TaskRunners.hs, a cluster of abbreviations including mRunConfig, mRegen, pp, n, initReq, and dsId were all expanded.

🧠 Disambiguating Duplicate Field Names

⚠️ Removing prefixes introduced a potential compiler challenge: when two record types have a field with the same name, GHC cannot always determine which type’s field is meant.

🔑 The primary solution is qualified module imports. 🗂️ Because DiscoveredSeries lives in Automation.BlogSeriesDiscovery and BlogSeriesRunConfig lives in Automation.Scheduler, importing Scheduler qualified as Scheduler makes the module the disambiguator. 🧩 Unqualified seriesId refers to DiscoveredSeries.seriesId; Scheduler.seriesId refers to BlogSeriesRunConfig.seriesId. ✅ No language extension is needed for this cross-module case.

🔬 The one remaining same-module conflict was DiscoveredSeries.priorityUser and RawConfig.priorityUser, both originally defined inside BlogSeriesDiscovery.hs. 📌 Qualified imports cannot disambiguate names within the same module. 🏗️ The clean solution is to move RawConfig into its own dedicated module, Automation.BlogSeriesDiscovery.RawConfig. 📦 Once RawConfig lives in a separate file, qualified imports handle any disambiguation and no language extension is needed anywhere in the project.

🧹 The approach also simplified other code. 🔄 With qualified imports, sortOn (\DiscoveredSeries{..} -> seriesId) successes becomes simply sortOn seriesId successes because the unqualified seriesId is now unambiguously DiscoveredSeries.seriesId. 🔄 Record update syntax like sampleDiscovered { searchGrounding = True } is similarly unambiguous, eliminating the need for test workarounds.

🏷️ The test helper unsafeParse was also renamed to parseSeries. 🚫 The “unsafe” prefix is an established Haskell convention for functions that throw on failure, but it is not needed here: a name like parseSeries already communicates what the function does, and the test context makes the failure behavior clear.

✅ Outcome

🟢 All 2007 tests pass. 🟢 Zero hlint hints. 🟢 The codebase is now free of Hungarian-notation-style prefixes and cryptic single-letter locals in these modules. 🔒 Cross-module field disambiguation is handled entirely by qualified imports — no language extensions required anywhere.

📚 Book Recommendations

📖 Similar

• 🧼💾 Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin is relevant because it makes the case for expressive naming and the boy-scout rule as core professional disciplines, mirroring exactly what this refactor applied.
• The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt is relevant because it introduces the concepts of self-documenting code and leaving the campground cleaner than you found it, which motivated this entire session.

↔️ Contrasting

• ✅💻 Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve McConnell offers a contrasting perspective where abbreviations are sometimes recommended for brevity in tightly scoped local variables, arguing that context can make short names acceptable.

🔗 Related

• Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce is related because the challenge of disambiguating duplicate record field names is fundamentally a story about the limits of type inference, a topic Pierce covers with great depth and clarity.