OT: What are the rules for forming the abbreviated forms of the German laws?

For example [1] lists Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz abbreviated as RflEttÜAÜG. I've receently had to deal with some German forms and after introducing the abbreviation in the first paragraph, the applicable law is usually referred to by that abbreviation.

1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%B...

> Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (“beef labelling regulation and delegation of supervision law”)

Funnily enough, this is mistranslated. It means "beef labelling supervision (task) delegation law". The "regulation and" incorrectly changes the meaning, there are no regulations being defined per that word.

The mistake likely originates from the full name of this law, "Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleisch­etikettierungs­überwachungs­aufgaben­übertragungs­gesetz", where the first part is "cow* labelling and…"

* Live animals, only the 2nd part is about meat products.

(It was all about tracking the origin of meat products, was a state law in one of the federal states of Germany, and was in force from 2000 until 2013.)

P.S.: there is some fancy hyphenation happening in that word! Make your window narrower ;D

My complaints against long names are: 1) It becomes harder to see the shape of the code. 2) It often becomes harder to tell different names apart (if they only differ in the middle, for example). Well-chosen (optimistic, I know...) short names are often easier to read than long ones.

This is what I like about Java: There is a culture of giving things descriptive names with very few abbreviations. Compare this with Go, where you can find tons of ugly C-style abbreviations.

But in Germany we are also very good at finding funny abbreviations. For example, the state's tax software is called ELSTER. ELSTER stands for „ELektronische STeuerERklärung“, which, funnily enough, is a thieving bird. The english bird name is magpie.

All of my code looks like this. I don't want to have to remember what some acronym or partial word/abbreviation means six months after writing it. I don't think "shorter variable names saves typing" is a compelling argument to me. You usually only type it once, but you always end up needing to read through the code several times.

I used to do this with filenames during bioinformatics analyses. Every step of the analysis was in the filename, so I'd get

oyster_results.filteredMAF0.05_filteredHWE0.05_etc._pp_.vcf.gz

I stopped doing that once I learned about file system-specific filename length limits...

13. Dont design ides, compilers and languages that punish you for good,long names. Having the best of identions, will not cut it.

Code golf variable names are intolerable. But there's a happy medium. If you name all your variables like "Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften", note that I am still a violent psychopath and I know where you live.

As with anything the right answer is probably somewhere in the middle

[dead]