Leave cutesy and or funny names for instances of software, not the software itself. You can have a complicated java program with dozens of classes and high levels of abstraction all named with the usual 'boring' names, and run an instance of that class an have it called r2d2, ultron, or "An Eridean named Rocky". That antropomorphizes the program, which leads to higher acceptance and easier internal communications.
Names should be cute, not descriptive
271–280 of 498 posts
Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive
#272I 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…
> Microsoft has taken the descriptive naming style all the way down to products
May be more on the "Developer Products" side, but this is exactly how I feel about PowerShell cmdlets... Did PowerShell's developer team dislike Linux's software/package/scripting ecosystem so much that they had to make two-word long capitalized command names a good practice?
Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive
#273I 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…
> Why are software engineers like this?
They're not. Some are.
Others are dead set on no cutey names. Causing people in their vicinity go around asking "why are software engineers such sticks in the mud?"
They're not. Some are.
Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive
#274TFA is based on a false dichotomy. You can have both. At one of my latest workplaces, there was a system of loosely connected, branching event-driven processing nodes where the events accumulated additional data as they rippled through the system. In the code and UI, this was represented as "heroes", coming from "guilds", "embarking" on "quests", eventually meeting their "reaper". On their quests, they entered "locat…
Along similar lines, we had a hell of a time getting various product people to understand template strings for translations. Eventually I got the idea to just call them "madlibs" and all of them understood it immediately.
Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive
#275TBH, I don't care if your names are cute or descriptive, but for the love of God, can they please be Google-unique? I don't want to search for a particular software tool and end up getting loads of results about hamsters.
Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'
And when the other person in the conversation looks perplexed or lost, just repeat it again, slowly, and add emotion to some of the syllables. They'll get it eventually.
Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive
#277Earlier 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…
Another example is Discord. In the beginning Discord servers were called Guilds and that's still their name in all their documentation and APIs. So it's more than company names.
Discord is a... indecent woman to work with, if you want to build a bot once so that it works for any longer period of time... you need to wake up, because that's sadly not how it works.
Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive
#278I agree with this 100% and have seen this play out many times. At one company we named the service “Harry” after one of the employees kid’s. Worked well, and I will fight for such names at any company I work at.
Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive
#279Are we short on good words to describe the moving parts of our systems? We use so many synonyms for "thing" that then get overloaded.
Do we not just need to invent some new words with specific and useful meanings?
I'm not sure where the different lines would be drawn. Perhaps thinking about a specific program might be helpful. This can't be new thinking can it.
What naming conventions do people use that aren't obvious but are useful?
Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive
#280It seems to me that you have bigger problems than nomenclature. Do you add comments to your code? That's because you're part of a team. When you add function it should go in a separate package. Again, you're part of a team.