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Posts tagged with naming

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Name the Date

– medium.com

Kevlin Henney wrote a good post on the importance of naming things well.

Good naming is part of design. It sets expectations and communicates a model, showing how something should be understood and used. If you mean to tell the reader getMillisSince1970, don’t say getTime.

Read more [medium.com]

A pair of helping hands when naming things

In a new post on his blog Sebastian De Deyne shares a few services and tools he uses to help him with naming things.

One of the hardest (and sometimes frustrating) tasks in a programmer's day-to-day workload is naming things. When I have a hard time finding that perfect word, I generally wind up in one of two situations:

  • I have a plausible name in mind, but I'm not entirely satisfied with it
  • I have no idea what I could possibly name it

Luckily, there are tools out there that can be of help.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/a-pair-of-helping-hands-when-naming-things

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Optimize programming by optimizing for scannability

Michael D. Hill posted a great new video on his blog where he makes the case for optimizing for scannability.

As programmers trying to ship more value faster, we want to optimize first around the part of the work that we spend the most time on, and that is scanning code– formulating little, tiny questions and flipping through the code looking for the answers. We optimize for scanning by focusing our attention on sizing, grouping, and, above all else, naming.

http://geepawhill.org/optimizing-a-program-and-programming/

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The status antipattern

In a new blogpost on vemv.net the author (I couldn't find his real name) argues against using a simple status field.

Dear programmer, do you ever use the name state for your variables? Like state = 42? “Hell no, that’s a terribly generic word. Better to use the domain-specific wording the variable refers to: is_invoiced, visit_count, shopping_cart, things like that.”

Sounds reasonable. But sometimes, you have a database column called status, and use it through your codebase, right? “Yes.”

Were you aware that status and state mean basically the same thing in English? “Uhm…”

https://blog.vemv.net/the-status-antipattern-479c26c7ddf7

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On Being Explicit

Mathias Verraes, one of the organizers of DDD Europe, recently gave a talk at DDD London on how to name things to both improve your code and to improve communication with the business.

“Make the implicit explicit” must be one of the most valuable advices I ever got about software modelling and design. Gather around for some tales from the trenches: stories from software projects where identifying a missing concept, and bringing it front and centre, turned the model inside out. Our tools: metaphors, pedantry, type systems, the age old heuristic of “Follow the money”, visual models, and a healthy obsession with language.

https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/8806-ddd-meetup

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When are single-character variable names acceptable?

Generally I don't like to abbreviate variable names. This answer on Quora lists a few situations where an abbreviation is probably ok.

There is a simple (but unsatisfying) answer to all questions of this form: they are acceptable when they would make the code clearer.

This can happen in a few ways. The most common, as you noted, is convention: i, j, k for loop variables, x and y for coordinates, e for exceptions, f and g for functions and so on.

Another is structure. Often, the broad structure of an expression is more important than its contents. Using shorter variable names makes it easier to read at a glance. I think this is often more important than being easy to read in detail!

If a variable has a very small scope—say one or two lines at most—and it's easy to see where it comes from, having a long name is just noise.

https://www.quora.com/When-are-single-character-variable-names-acceptable/answer/Tikhon-Jelvis

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Using class_alias to maintain BC while moving/renaming classes

I've been using PHP for quite some time now, and I had never heard of class_alias before reading this post by Fabian Schmengler.

Sometimes you want to rename a class or move it to a different namespace. But as soon as it is used anywhere outside the package, this is breaking backwards compatibility and should not be done lightheartedly.

Luckily there is a way in PHP to have both, the old class and the new class, while deprecating the old one: class_alias().

https://www.schmengler-se.de/en/2016/09/php-using-class_alias-to-maintain-bc-while-move-rename-classes/

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Hunting for great names in programming

A great story by DHH on his quest to find good names for some functions he was working on.

One of the real delights of programming is picking great variable, method, and class names. But an even greater treat is when you can name pairs, or even whole narratives, that fit just right. And the very best of those is when you’re forced to trade off multiple forces pulling in different directions.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/hunting-for-great-names-in-programming-16f624c8fc03

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What do you name the callback function?

Derick Bailey on his blog:

JavaScript practically requires callback functions to do anything asynchronous. Unless you’re talking about generators, you really can’t get away from them. Callbacks are everywhere.

...

I do use different names for the callback parameter, depending on the circumstance. I believe naming is important as it provides a set of expectations. If your code breaks the expectations of the name, people will be confused and it will cause problems.

http://derickbailey.com/2016/02/15/what-do-you-name-the-callback-function/

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