Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Names should be cute, not descriptive

ntietz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 498 posts

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#91

Post by nicbou »

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.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ&t=40

This is how it ends up sounding like.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#92

Post by raydiatian »

brianpan wrote: post #32
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

Okay so everything I said is apparently already a much more thought out rant

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#93

Post by ihatepython »

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…

My default is to name the project something related to Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Then when things go off the rails, I can say 'Shaka, when the walls fell'

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#94

Post by drewcoo »

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?

I think code reviews might.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#95

Post by dbingham »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #84
dbingham wrote: post #79

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 ma…

This is good advice in the small, but I think the author is correct for larger services. I can't tell you how many times someone insisted on a name that was "universal such and such" which, uh, turned out not to be universal. More concretely, this is good advice for services that you expect many teams to hook into, and not great advice for services that you think should not expand 1-3 teams ever .

I think the problem you're speaking to has more to do with attempts at "universal" design. Which actually runs counter to the principal that services should have a limited, clearly defined set of responsibilities.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#97

Post by nzach »

The worst is when cute meets descriptive.

I've worked at a place where we had dozens of microservices, all named after random mythology. And all names must had some relevance to the actual function of the service.

The shopping cart service was named Freyja[0].

The content management service was called Metis[1].

Every single service had a 'cute but descriptive' name, and it was hell.

If you didn't know that tale, the names don't mean anything. And if you do know you still have to guess what the the service does.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freyja

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metis_(mythology)

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#98

Post by ilyt »

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.

You need to do it anyway if your names are too descriptive*

"video-encoder is not working"

"oh, you mean ffmpeg"

"no, our microservice is called video encoder"

Also they are not neccesarily one or the other, you can name something that hints at its function but it is not straight dictionary description of it.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#99

Post by ilyt »

dbingham wrote: post #79

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 ma…

> 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.

That is for name of variable. Changing a name of whole application can be royal PITA all over the stack, if the "one time change" is "scour every documentation ever produced and change the name there too so people won't get confused.

And not just docs, put the name of service as query in Grafana ? Gotta go around dashboards changing that too

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#100

Post by ilyt »

nzach wrote: post #97

The worst is when cute meets descriptive. I've worked at a place where we had dozens of microservices, all named after random mythology. And all names must had some relevance to the actual function of the service. The shopping cart service was named Freyja[0]. The content management service was called Metis[1]. Every single service had a 'cute but descriptive' name, and it was hell. If you didn't know that tale, the…

Metaphors don't qualify for cute but descriptive, there is nothing descriptive about it.
Post reply on HN