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Names should be cute, not descriptive

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Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#261

Post by surement »

pmelendez wrote: post #146
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…

> You know what is fun when it comes to work? Things that work, are named appropriately, are understandable, and people not needing trivialities I don’t know I agree with this. Microsoft has taken the descriptive naming style all the way down to products. Not only names like Batch or Functions don’t add much value, but also it makes searching information about them much harder than “cute” names (such as Excel). I als…

> Not only names like Batch or Functions don’t add much value

overly vague names have the same problems cute names have, and you generally see the same type of people using them (those who think software is "hard to change"–you're thinking of hardware!)

countless codebases have something called "entity" some geezer wrote a million years ago that the only reason it hasn't been deleted is that it's so generic everything depends on it

code that's hard to change or delete is bad code

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#262

Post by Spivak »

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.

Well yeah because those things are all specific implementations of services. They need to have unique names for preciseness.

"Oh yeah we've moved our app processes into containers which we manage with our workload scheduler and discovery service."

What is the app? What kind of containers? What kind of scheduler? What kind of discovery service? Guess you just have to know. Verses.

"Oh yeah we moved our frontend Rails processes into Docker containers which we manage with Nomad and Consul."

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#263

Post by yokoprime »

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…

Vermeer Technologies still linger in Microsoft 365. I think they were acquired in the 90s and their product became Frontpage, which became SharePoint. A bunch of critical services lives in _vti_bin

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#265

Post by ycombobreaker »

bmitc wrote: post #206
gilbetron wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Cute names have no chance of being useful.

A cute name can be useful if it implies its intent. This usually relies upon some social shared context.

Gopher: mechanism for fetching data

Ask Jeeves: search engine

Alta Vista: i guess literally a lookout point

Web itself is an analogy, and probably so successful that it no longer sounds cute.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#266

Post by gnull »

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…

Agreed. People may not be determined enough and that's fine because not every cause is worth determination.

I say this each time someone wants to rename something for social justice reasons. Renaming is a lot of hussle, and if you decide to go for it you better know what exactly it is that you're buying with it.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#267

Post by surement »

afarrell wrote: post #156
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…

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.

So many software "engineers" think their job is to make writing their code easier rather than to make reading it easier by the rest of the company. Presumably they think that the faster they write code, the better they are as engineers, and then they add "fighting fires" type skills to their repertoire for all the bugs they contribute to by making code opaque to everyone else.

Prevent fires, take time writing good code, your (current and future) coworkers and customers will thank you.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#268

Post by ryanjshaw »

carlosrdrz wrote: post #153

Surely there is some middle ground? Why everything has to be black or white and everyone needs to give silver bullet rules? A service that stores something can be called "catalog" and it is descriptive, short and memorable. On the other hand, a service that does too many things can be called "zeus" or "cyclops" or whatever and that's okay too. It's difficult to have memorable and short names when things do too many t…

I feel it's helpful to distinguish between "applications" and the "services" that make up those applications.

- application name: not descriptive unless you are 100% sure scope will not change over time (e.g. a specific report mandated by a regulator); exception to the rule: I actually like using initialisms because they start off descriptive but then over time people use the initialisms exclusively and its almost like you invented a non-descriptive word without the initial confusion

- service names: start with a monolith that is just the application name (or suffix "Core"), only split into other services once you have a good reason, and scope is clear, and then give it a descriptive name

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#269

Post by Izkata »

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…

> Now if they named it after a good character from a story everyone knows

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#270

Post by JoBrad »

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…

Exactly. Being descriptive is how you get a service that does something completely unrelated to its name, later on. Or worse, you end up with 2 services with similar names that do similar things, and users aren’t sure why there are 2, but just know which one they like.
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