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Names should be cute, not descriptive

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Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#201

Post by lodovic »

bmitc wrote: post #191
superb-owl wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trouble is, names are hard to change. > No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. This is very untrue. Many moons ago my company changed its name, and we still have the old name lingering around in stupid places. There are e.g. several third-party services which simply won't let us change the name and carry our data forward, or where proper migration would take eng-months. I guess you could say we…

We're talking about software service and component names. Not names in general or company names.

In a large enough project, this sometimes results in pull requests covering hundreds of files. While the renaming itself may be a simple task, getting multiple reviews takes a lot of effort and management may have other priorities.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#203

Post by lo_zamoyski »

causi wrote: post #149
bmitc wrote: post #128

I could not disagree more. > Trouble is, names are hard to change. No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. > It's impossible to predict with certainty how your software's requirements will evolve over time. You don’t need to predict it. You evolve things as needed, including names of components of the system. The idea that you need to pick a generic name because you don’t want to specify exactly w…

Modern generic-ass naming schemes are absolutely infuriating. I hear someone say "oh yeah, it's been easier since we moved our Bluē processes into Laundr containers which we manage through a mix of Bicycle and Parakeet" and my lungs are not big enough for the sigh I want to emit.

Try discussing Elastic Beanstalk around non-dev coworkers.

Labels can obscure and obfuscate as much as they can reveal. One must ask what the badly named thing is. What does it do?

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#204

Post by afarrell »

xeyownt wrote: post #165
afarrell wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cute names are fun for the people creating them and writing code. They are stressful for the people trying to make sense of code and maintain a product under a deadline. The question is, which matters more: A. Having fun yourself over the course of a week. B. Getting a job done and helping your coworkers get their job done over the course of years.

I guess the point is to give cute names to things that will last years and have a large scope, not to every variable in your code.

This calls for a marketing person with more experience in branding. I’d aim for meaningful metaphors.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#205

Post by ddulaney »

bmitc wrote: post #191
superb-owl wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trouble is, names are hard to change. > No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. This is very untrue. Many moons ago my company changed its name, and we still have the old name lingering around in stupid places. There are e.g. several third-party services which simply won't let us change the name and carry our data forward, or where proper migration would take eng-months. I guess you could say we…

We're talking about software service and component names. Not names in general or company names.

Software names and component names can be really hard to change though, especially because those names tend to leak into the public API.

When my company got acquired, they rebranded our C++ library, but to this day the old software name persists in the namespace it uses because they weren’t willing to break every customer’s code. The name of the software can become part of the API in lots of ways (URL component, C++ or Java or other namespace, executable file name for scripting, etc.).

So yes, software service and component names are hard to change when customers start relying on them.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#206

Post by bmitc »

gilbetron wrote: post #178
bmitc wrote: post #128

I could not disagree more. > Trouble is, names are hard to change. No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. > It's impossible to predict with certainty how your software's requirements will evolve over time. You don’t need to predict it. You evolve things as needed, including names of components of the system. The idea that you need to pick a generic name because you don’t want to specify exactly w…

I utterly disagree with you. After 30+ years of doing this, I almost always despise "descriptive names" - they are almost always wrong, generic, and hard to say/type. They are difficult to change, and even if you do change them, you just end up with another crappy descriptive name. "database-writer" or "user-database-writer" or "database-post-writer" or "event-logger" or "event-logger-2". While every once in a while…

Descriptive names can still be bad. Cute names have no chance of being useful. Someone else pointed it out or alluded to it, but I suppose there is a gradient of abstraction. The level of abstraction, from product to service to component to module to function to variable names, probably determines some allowance in how generic the name can be, from more generic to less generic, respectively.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#207

Post by superb-owl »

bmitc wrote: post #191
superb-owl wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trouble is, names are hard to change. > No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. This is very untrue. Many moons ago my company changed its name, and we still have the old name lingering around in stupid places. There are e.g. several third-party services which simply won't let us change the name and carry our data forward, or where proper migration would take eng-months. I guess you could say we…

We're talking about software service and component names. Not names in general or company names.

It's the same principle IMO.

The name gets repeated in so many places if it's important. Documentation, code, URLs, databases--even just finding all the places you need to change it involves a ton of work.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#209

Post by taneq »

causi wrote: post #149
bmitc wrote: post #128

I could not disagree more. > Trouble is, names are hard to change. No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. > It's impossible to predict with certainty how your software's requirements will evolve over time. You don’t need to predict it. You evolve things as needed, including names of components of the system. The idea that you need to pick a generic name because you don’t want to specify exactly w…

Modern generic-ass naming schemes are absolutely infuriating. I hear someone say "oh yeah, it's been easier since we moved our Bluē processes into Laundr containers which we manage through a mix of Bicycle and Parakeet" and my lungs are not big enough for the sigh I want to emit.

And then you look up the Bluē website and it just says "revolutionize your business by streamlining Laundr workflow!" and the Laundr website describes it as "flexible double-acting hypercraft for Parakeet ecosystems" and the Bicycle website just says "Bicycle" with a giant picture of a fixed-speed bike.

(I'm assuming you made all these names up but honestly I can't even tell any more.)

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#210

Post by pjc50 »

superb-owl wrote: post #185
bmitc wrote: post #128

I could not disagree more. > Trouble is, names are hard to change. No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. > It's impossible to predict with certainty how your software's requirements will evolve over time. You don’t need to predict it. You evolve things as needed, including names of components of the system. The idea that you need to pick a generic name because you don’t want to specify exactly w…

> Trouble is, names are hard to change. > No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. This is very untrue. Many moons ago my company changed its name, and we still have the old name lingering around in stupid places. There are e.g. several third-party services which simply won't let us change the name and carry our data forward, or where proper migration would take eng-months. I guess you could say we…

There are quite a few of these. Jenkins has "Hudson" in its internal namespaces. Various Microsoft products have their old names in classes. Once a name is used externally, it doesn't matter how organized you are, there are uses outwith your control.
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