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Names should be cute, not descriptive

ntietz.com

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Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#71

Post by mostertoaster »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #57
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.

One of the cute names horrowshow for me is Chef. Everything is based on some supposedly cooking analogue that just does not fit with (at least my) mental model of IaC.

This is because cook books while useful, aren’t entertaining stories. Now if they named it after a good character from a story everyone knows, say the hunter from the big bad wolf, and it’s purpose was to chop up evil wolves taking advantage of grandmas and little girls with baked goods, then everyone knows that character, and as long as the purpose of the service is to defeat impostors trying to do harm then it is fitting.

And if the junior doesn’t know the story of little red riding hood, well then it is your lucky day and you are one of the 1 in 10000 who gets to tell them the story.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#72

Post by mostertoaster »

mostertoaster wrote: post #71
jnsaff2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the cute names horrowshow for me is Chef. Everything is based on some supposedly cooking analogue that just does not fit with (at least my) mental model of IaC.

This is because cook books while useful, aren’t entertaining stories. Now if they named it after a good character from a story everyone knows, say the hunter from the big bad wolf, and it’s purpose was to chop up evil wolves taking advantage of grandmas and little girls with baked goods, then everyone knows that character, and as long as the purpose of the service is to defeat impostors trying to do harm then it is f…

;) https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#73

Post by pbnsh »

bobbiechen wrote: post #60

I'll put in a vote in favor of cute names, in the specific scenario of talking (out loud) about specific services - it's less clunky and personally, way easier to correctly parse cute names than common-words-which-may-combine-into-a-service-name. To take some examples from public cloud: "We can put that data in Cloud Storage Archive" vs. "We can put that data in Glacier" "This service runs as a function in Azure Func…

Was that company by any chance founded by a rick roll sent via an api/sms and has 4 dots in it's logo?

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#74

Post by pipeline_peak »

> The world is boring enough as is. Let's add more whimsy and cuteness through our service and project names.

Cute names suck, a list of them obfuscates a development stack to newcomers and they’re just hard to take seriously. At my company, we have Jira, SumoDB, and Java. I wonder what that means to a Business Analyst, surely they know straight away.

The hipsterdom in the tech world is cringe. Go teach (force) your kids to learn Python with the children’s book you wrote. Oh and don’t forget to give it a cute name that sounds Japanese or like a type of tea, we need more of those…We’re totally not going to look back on cute names in 20 years as a silly fad

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#75

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

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.

I have the opposite problem as a recent new hire: when "cute" project names show up in a conversation, it signals something company-specific I need to learn about. When descriptive project names are used (especially if the projects are using really generic one or two word names like "routing-service"), it is harder to realize that people are talking about an implementation of a concept rather than a well-known concept.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#76

Post by sublinear »

I only agree if I'm allowed to reinterpret "cute" as easily recognized uniqueness.

The motivation for cuteness seems to be a spiteful false equivalence made between unintentionally bad names and deliberately silly names.

Good names come from well organized projects.

It's sad to hear some would rather name their servers after dolphin species than address the communication problems on a team.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#77

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

Cute names often (not always) rely on a specific cultural context that many devs in the present, and definitely many devs five years down the line, won't share. When people argue for "cute" names over "descriptive" names, what they really often mean is "names that are actually descriptive but only if you understand my obscure nerd joke / spent your childhood playing pokemon". Or they pick a theme and end up trying to stick with it and make something vaguely, but not really descriptive within that theme. It also makes searching for internal documentation a nightmare.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#78

Post by 28304283409234 »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #67
germanfella wrote: post #55

I made an account on HN because this is the worst post I have ever read here. NO!!!! DON'T USE CUTE NAMES!!! I am currently working with a big company for my apps and it is full of cute names which are the biggest problem for me. To launch an app you have first to integrate the Zaamla-Service into your IDE. Then just patch things up with Pimble, upload the signed HIMA-Package into the Katala and activate after that Z…

Sounds more like architectural/tooling problem. We use pretty much random names for our servers and other hardware, but all of that is abstracted so during normal operation you don't even know what thing you are using unless you want to for some reason. I am not really for or against using names instead of numbers or whatever, because I should never even need to care if things are done right.

I heard that Ifthingsaredoneright is a really nice planet to visit one day.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#79

Post by dbingham »

You're optimizing for the wrong things and working with an artificially limited set of constraints.

The rule of thumb is that we spend 10x the amount of time reading code that we do writing it. When you use cute names to avoid the pain of name changes when the service changes, you're optimizing for writing over reading. It's a mistake. You pay the cost of a name change once, but you pay the cost of an unclear name many, many times per day.

Further, you're introducing unnecessary, artificial constraints. If you need to add new responsibilities to a service that don't fit with in it's existing scope - the correct answer is to make a new service.

Granted, some times we don't have time for either a rename or a new service and we have to duct tape the functionality wherever we can. This is called techdebt. It should be documented, tracked, and paid down at a later date... By renaming the service or refactoring out a new one.

Attaching arbitrary functionality on to cutely named services that don't have logical coherence is not future proofing. It's really bad software design.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#80

Post by operatingthetan »

ummonk wrote: post #48
operatingthetan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is a comment talking about whimsical content "only vaguely related"?

The comment did not address any points in the article. It only mentions their view that a certain group uses this type of name. That's the "vague" part.
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