Long names, short names, it all depends. There are a lot of approaches and discussions but in fact a method's name should reflect its intention. This helps you to further understand the code. Take this example.
public void print(String s)
Nifty name, short, concise... isn't it? Well, actually no if there's no documentation to tell you what do you mean by "Printing". I say System.our.println
is a way of printing a string but you can define printing as saving the string in a file or showing it in a dialog.
public void printInConsole(String s)
Now there are no misunderstandings. Most people can tell you that you can read the method's JavaDoc to understand it but... are you going to read a full paragraph to decide if the method you're going to use does what you need?.
IMO, methods should describe at least an action and an entity (if they're related to one). "Long" is also a perception... but really long names make the code hard to structure. It's a matter of getting the proper balance.
As a rule of thumb, I'd void abreviations and use JavaDoc to further describe a method's intention. Descriptive names can be long but the reward is both readability and a self-explainatory code.