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2026-05-03 | 🔤 Expand Abbreviations: Haskell Pass 17 🧹

🎯 What This Pass Accomplished

🔢 This is the seventeenth pass in the ongoing effort to eliminate every abbreviated name from the Haskell codebase. 🧹 Each pass reviews the living plan in specs/expand-abbreviations.md, takes the next batch of unchecked steps, and then creates a new issue so the work can continue incrementally. 🏗️ The guiding principle is simple: every name in the code should declare its purpose out loud, without requiring the reader to decode any shorthand.

🔟 The Ten Steps of This Pass

🐛 Step 1 — go to paginatedFetch in StaticGiscus

🌀 The fetchAllDiscussions function in StaticGiscus.hs used an inner helper called go to paginate through GitHub GraphQL discussion results. 🤔 The name go is one of the most opaque names in functional programming — it communicates nothing about what the helper does. 🔄 The new name paginatedFetch describes exactly what the helper performs: it fetches one page at a time, following pagination cursors until there are no more pages.

📝 Step 2 — bpBody to body in BlogPosts

📦 The BlogPost record had four fields. Three of them were renamed in pass 16 (bpFilename, bpDate, bpTitle), leaving bpBody as the last one with a Hungarian-notation bp prefix. 🏷️ Renaming it to body required one extra step: in BlogPrompt.hs, two functions called formatPost and formatCrossSeriesPost each bound a local variable also named body. 🔀 If the field and the local variable share the same name, Haskell’s let block treats the binding as recursive, which would cause an infinite loop or a type error. 🏷️ The two local variables were therefore renamed to postBody to keep them distinct from the record field accessor.

🗂️ Steps 3 through 10 — Clearing the fmLines, updatedFm, and updateFmFields Cluster

📄 A recurring pattern across the codebase is a three-part sequence: split content into lines, find the frontmatter section, and fold over the frontmatter lines to update specific fields. 🔡 The variable holding the raw frontmatter lines was consistently abbreviated to fmLines, and the updated version was abbreviated to updatedFm. ✍️ In ReflectionTitle.hs, the helper that does this updating was named updateFmFields, with the same Fm shorthand.

📁 The four files touched in this cluster were Frontmatter.hs, InternalLinking.hs, BlogImage.hs, and ReflectionTitle.hs. 🔄 In each file, fmLines became frontmatterLines and updatedFm became updatedFrontmatter. 🏷️ In ReflectionTitle.hs, the function updateFmFields was also renamed to updateFrontmatterFields, matching the naming style already used in InternalLinking.hs where the same concept had previously been named updateFrontmatterFields. 🔎 Because updateFmFields was an internal (non-exported) helper, the rename required only a single definition change and one call site change in the same file.

📋 Plan Updates

🗺️ While reviewing SocialPosting/FrontmatterUpdate.hs, several previously unnoticed abbreviations came to light. 📝 These were added as new unchecked items to the plan:

• 🏷️ ls appears as a short name for the split content lines in both updateFrontmatterTimestamp and updateFrontmatterUrl. 🔤 These should become contentLines.
• 📂 fmLines and updatedFm appear in the same two functions and need the same treatment as in the other files.
• 🔧 The upsertFmField helper has Fm in its name. 🔄 It should become upsertFrontmatterField.
• 🔑 Inside upsertFmField, the parameter renderedVal should be renderedValue, the local has should be hasKey, and pat should be keyPattern.

🔍 A sweep of the upsertField function in InternalLinking.hs also revealed pat and a single-letter parameter p inside the inner matchesKey helper. 📝 Both were added to the plan as keyPattern and prefix respectively.

🌀 Finally, a broader search confirmed that go is used as an inner helper name in nine other places across the codebase: in CliArgs.hs, Retry.hs, ObsidianSync.hs, GcpAuth.hs, Text.hs, TaskRunner.hs, InternalLinking/CandidateDiscovery.hs, InternalLinking/LinkExtraction.hs, and SocialPosting/LinkExtraction.hs. 🗒️ Each was added to the plan with a descriptive replacement name.

🧪 Verification

🏗️ After all ten changes, the project compiled cleanly with zero warnings. ✅ All 2031 tests passed. 🧹 The hlint linter reported zero hints. 📐 The changes were surgical and minimal: only the names themselves were modified, with no logic changes.

📚 Book Recommendations

📖 Similar

• 🧼💾 Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin is relevant because it makes the same argument this post embodies: that names are the most important design decision in code, and that abbreviated names silently tax every future reader who must decode them.
• The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt is relevant because it champions the idea that code should communicate intent clearly, and its “DRY” principle extends naturally to naming: do not make readers repeat mental decoding work on every encounter with a name.

↔️ Contrasting

• ✅💻 Code Complete by Steve McConnell offers a contrasting view in that it acknowledges abbreviations as occasionally acceptable when they are well-established within a team or domain, whereas this codebase takes the stricter position that all abbreviations must be expanded without exception.

🔗 Related

• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler is relevant because the rename-variable and rename-function refactorings performed in this pass are among the most foundational techniques in Fowler’s catalog, and the incremental approach taken here mirrors his advice to make small, safe, verifiable changes.