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astronomy-commons / lsdb

Large Survey DataBase
https://lsdb.io
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Suggest improvements to API names #129

Closed nevencaplar closed 5 months ago

nevencaplar commented 9 months ago

Investigate the names and conventions in astronomical software packages; ensure that our names are consistent and as clear as possible. As an example, I find that .read_hipscat() is somewhat confusing as ``read'' part implies that something is actually being done, and it not consistent with lazy load paradigm.

The end result is a set of suggestion to change the name of certain methods.

Implementation to be described in a separate ticket.

camposandro commented 5 months ago

LSDB, unlike other astronomical packages, operates lazily by nature. Less than a handful of methods implicitly run computations for the user (e.g. head, prune_empty_partitions, skymap), so we decided to keep read_hipscat's current naming and provide more disclaimers in the documentation about this behavior.

The *_search catalog methods are coherently named, and follow the astropy / astropy-healpix decision of having the search keyword in the signature. The exception is box, which we should rename to box_search.

camposandro commented 5 months ago

Closed by #345. A diagram of the LSDB pipeline should further clarify the lazy nature of the package #332.