It's all about managing entropy. Less surprising means you can use fewer letters. More surprising means more letters. That shouldn't be too controversial.
The part where it gets tricky is when a concept is widely used, but is a complex concept. What if you have dozens of calls to cudaGetTextureAlignmentOffset in a function, and hundreds in a codebase? Heck, even CUDA is an acronym, Compute Unified Device Architecture.
There's a similar complication when you have several of these big names with slight differences. Made up example, say you also had cudaGetTextureAccessKey, cudaGetVectorAlignmentOffset, etc. I actually find these sometimes worse than the initialisms, as my eyes skip over these long names. The acronyms (CGTAO, CGTAK, CGVAO) have a higher ratio of different letters to total length. But then obviously the abbreviations are very opaque.
> It's all about managing entropy. Less surprising means you can use fewer letters.
I like this framing.
> The part where it gets tricky is when a concept is widely used, but is a complex concept. What if you have dozens of calls to cudaGetTextureAlignmentOffset in a function, and hundreds in a codebase?
You have to predict the knowledge of the developers (current and future) working on the system, and let that guide what you can assume. This is necessarily an art and you'll miss the mark sometimes. One approach is to always be overly verbose, but this is too simple: it destroys readability when practiced without restraint.
> There's a similar complication when you have several of these big names with slight differences. Made up example, say you also had cudaGetTextureAccessKey, cudaGetVectorAlignmentOffset, etc.
One technique here is to introduce a namespacing object/module/<whatever you call it in your language>. So something like "cuda.textureAccessKey", "cuda.vectorAlignmentOffset", etc. Sometimes repetition of a long name is the least of all evils, sometimes it's not.
The part where it gets tricky is when a concept is widely used, but is a complex concept. What if you have dozens of calls to cudaGetTextureAlignmentOffset in a function, and hundreds in a codebase? Heck, even CUDA is an acronym, Compute Unified Device Architecture.
There's a similar complication when you have several of these big names with slight differences. Made up example, say you also had cudaGetTextureAccessKey, cudaGetVectorAlignmentOffset, etc. I actually find these sometimes worse than the initialisms, as my eyes skip over these long names. The acronyms (CGTAO, CGTAK, CGVAO) have a higher ratio of different letters to total length. But then obviously the abbreviations are very opaque.