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Names should be cute, not descriptive

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Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#281

Post by leokennis »

tauwauwau wrote: post #200

I think we are mixing two different scopes in the the discussion here. If you are naming a company or a product that will be offered to clients, name it something unique that'll appear in searches. However, if you're writing a piece of software that's not going to go outside the company, having descriptive name is the way to go. You can even name your products with generic descriptive names, if your company's name is…

The issue is, if you create an internal tool that allows you to order printer paper for your departments printer you might name it "PaperSupplier": https://papersupplier.acme.com. If it doesn't work, just send a mail to papersupplier@acme.com!

And it works so well, the company now also wants employees to order staples and hole punchers through it.

What do you do now?

Are you going to rename the tool, change the address, change the e-mail?

Or is your company now going to have you order your staples through "https://papersupplier.acme.com"?

We all know it's the second.

My strategy would be to go for very generic names: even though it (initially) only allows you to order paper, name it "Internal Supply Portal" or something.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#282

Post by grahar64 »

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…

Names are super hard to change. They end up everywhere, service directories, URLS, DNS, infrastructure, package names…

It might take a months of work to change a name, just to fix the name of a service which is no longer accurate.

Instead most companies will say something like “that is the translation-service, it is 10 years old. It doesn’t translate anything anymore, but provides load balancing and Auth”

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#283

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

I agree with this. Where I work, one team has given descriptive names to everything and several other teams have then shortened them inconsistently. So it's tribal knowledge that "cloud" and "gen2" are the same thing, and software/platform/gen1 are almost the same thing, but configured differently.

If we had called them Frank and Susan, we'd know what each other means.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#284

Post by grahar64 »

arichard123 wrote: post #279

Are 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 obviou…

The word “transaction” is so overloaded it would be pointless to use in a system. At a previous company we had to have a glossary of words that you could use instead just so the documentation made sense.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#285

Post by JackFr »

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 can have the worst of both worlds. I've worked at three(!) seperate companies which have had projects called 'Hydra' (and the number of people who were ignorant of what the Hydra was, and why it might not have been a great name for a software project never ceased to amaze me.)

I like clever, cute names. That is names like Hydra, Spirit, and others which are unrelated to the function, but which are anodyne and generic and not terribly uncommon end up being the worst.

(I have a soft spot for clever names, my favorite is still Leiningen the clojure build system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiningen_Versus_the_Ants)

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#286

Post by salawat »

toomanyrichies wrote: post #253
thedorkknight wrote: post #228

So basically descriptive names might eventually become non-descriptive, or loosely connected. "Cute" names are ALWAYS non-descriptive or loosely connected though. So at worst, a descriptive name eventually becomes as bad as a cutesy name. Given my experience being onboarded onto legacy code, and bringing others up to speed on my team's code, I'd much rather have names help coders understand the systems 9/10 times as…

> descriptive names might eventually become non-descriptive It's worse than being non-descriptive- it's that they become misleading . "Cute" names don't tell you anything. Formerly descriptive names tell you the wrong thing . This, in turn, means developers can no longer trust that a descriptive name is accurate. It plants a seed of doubt in a developer's mind about other names. It tells them that, here at WidgetCorp…

>It's worse than being non-descriptive- it's that they become misleading. "Cute" names don't tell you anything. Formerly descriptive names tell you the wrong thing.

My God... You don't mean to tell me you actually object to having to read code and figuring out what it does in the grand scheme of things?

I swear, everyone wants to be a writer, but no one wants to read and understand.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#287

Post by starkd »

perrygeo wrote: post #227
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 can work there for months before you know what does. It’s because it’s generic and because a “fun” name was chosen, its responsibilities have not only changed but its number of responsibilities have changed Excellent insight! If you use cutesy names, the intent of the component will get muddled and responsibilities will be strewn about. I've never seen an exception. Your components become a fuzzy set of contain…

It seems these cutesy type names are more representations of proprietary code than open source modules. The name becomes opaque to its internals.

I noticed when I switched form MS Windows to Linux, there was a marked difference in the names of tools and modules. So, you could get a better high-level understanding for how it works. With Windows, the solution was more than likely strictly prescriptive. But with an open source design, it becomes much easier to grok the whole setup. Not sure if this is entirely do to naming conventions. It might also have to do with the online communities.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#288

Post by eYrKEC2 »

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…

What if this is survivor-bias?

The only services that continue to live have memorable, marketable names that stick in people's heads and make them want to say the service because of the cheap dopamine hit they get from being "in-the-know".

The ones that no longer exist were purely utilitarian, but since their identity was pure functionality they are only known as their bugs and quickly despised?

---

I don't know if this is true. Just asking the question.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#289

Post by grahar64 »

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…

If you work at a company for more than a week you will get used to the names of services and what they do.

But if the name of a service becomes a lie because of changing requirements, then it will be an actual hinderance to understanding a system.

Re: Names should be cute, not descriptive

#290

Post by f4c39012 »

pbnsh wrote: post #87
someweirdperson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ! NEVER USE CUTE NAMES IN ANYTHING ! So I guess you first-born is called pants-pooper?

No, I address them as child01-mother01, child02-mother01, child03-mother02 and so on.

How are their grandparents addressed?
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