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Names should be cute, not descriptive

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Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#31

Post by doctor_eval »

operatingthetan wrote: post #21
meindnoch wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flagged to death. Sigh… Kinda proves your point.

Probably because it appears they are fishing for a political fight, and they are referencing their own vaguely related post from four days ago as if someone else wrote it ten years ago.

Right? Also, where are the "bloody slavering fangs"? It's just a blog post about whimsical naming. Some people will agree, some will disagree. Hardly a touchstone of "internet communists" or "transhumanists". And a bizarre perspective, considering who is behind recent events in the USA and Brazil.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#32

Post by brianpan »

raydiatian wrote: post #12

Yeah this seems like a terrible argument. Here is what onboarding looks like, if we all followed this: “Okay so, the part of the app you’re working on is weeble-wobble which handles transactions. Weeble-wobble interfaces with poopy-leg to create financial reports, and with screaming-kidney to do fraud analysis.” Maybe this is fine for devops? I mean, if pets, not cattle is the regime within the org

Don't forget about Galactus, the all-knowing user service provider aggregator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#33

Post by sph »

camdenlock wrote: post #5

[flagged]

The saddest thing about our modern times is seeing how rejecting the status quo has been incorporated into politics. Once upon a time, one would reject politics and factionalism together with the cutesy corporate agenda you're ranting against.

Now you get politicised posers like you blaming everything on "Internet socialists" and "communists".

Party politics is not punk. Stop pretending it is.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#34

Post by ls15 »

drstewart wrote: post #28
doctor_eval wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but surely there is a directory somewhere that explains this? I mean - the problem is not the number of names but the number of services. A new hire still isn't going to be able to work out what a service does just based on the name, regardless of how whimsical or apt it is. "policy-engine" might seem to be a good name for a service, but it's only one level below "kevin" in terms of opaqueness, especially when t…

>Yeah but surely there is a directory somewhere that explains this? No, there's 5 different directories in 3 different formats compiled across the last 8 years representing the state of 80% of terms at the time it was last updated, half of which disagree with another version.

I can confirm this

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#35

Post by eyelidlessness »

I still lament the time when a former team had to rename a service referencing a noble sea creature to its perfunctory backend purpose, and our corresponding service with a rhyming name referencing hair loss had to be renamed to reflect its unambitious web target.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#36

Post by resonious »

paxys wrote: post #24
rikkuri wrote: post #11

Descriptive name guards from feature creeping because every one understands the scope of service. If it is always tempting to add new features to the existing services, creation of new services should be done to be easier.

You really think a name is going to hold anyone back from this?

Right, the article itself actually uses this as a compelling reason for cute names. If I release "X service", then it inevitably becomes "X and Y service" and the old name is now misleading.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#38

Post by ummonk »

doctor_eval wrote: post #25
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #10

Cute names are fun when for a few special things here and there. Cute names are a nightmare when a company has accumulated hundreds of quirkily named things that you have to memorize just to navigate through the basics of trying to get your job done. New hires suffer the most. It’s an extra layer of company-specific jargon that you have to learn to even begin to understand what your peers are talking about.

Yeah but surely there is a directory somewhere that explains this? I mean - the problem is not the number of names but the number of services. A new hire still isn't going to be able to work out what a service does just based on the name, regardless of how whimsical or apt it is. "policy-engine" might seem to be a good name for a service, but it's only one level below "kevin" in terms of opaqueness, especially when t…

"policy-engine" is an example of a name that is neither cute nor descriptive

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#39

Post by knorker »

Cute names are awful.

What, you don't remember every Star Trek character? What, you can't spell every Greek philosopher?

Really, you don't know which are star names and which are galaxy names?

And then there's the reuse. Which project mayhem is this?

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#40

Post by doctor_eval »

extr wrote: post #20

Nice theory. In practice all this does is make it harder to onboard new people. Quick test: It's your 2nd week on the job. Some core system just went down, and you've been assigned to figure out what service is causing the trouble. What makes for easier, more transparent reading of error logs, the name "ServiceRouter", or the name "Trainstation"? It's not just a matter of the name being perfectly descriptive for any…

Who would assign a core system failure resolution task to a newbie who's been there two weeks?

Also, per the article, the problem is that "ServiceRouter" maybe isn't as obvious as you might think. The actual HTTP routing might be done by "HttpPathInspector". "ServiceRouter" is actually a non-core message router for analytics.

Naming is hard.

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