Names should be cute, not descriptive

I find the comparison to cholesterol to be a bit ridiculous. Your argument seems like a case of “well technically this strategy is imperfect so we shouldn’t even try.”

The the reasons you wouldn't do that are also reasons you shouldn't do it for services.

A product might have a code and/or marketing name, but that's a different story. You shouldn't give cute names to services or other internal components pieces of products. Every time this comes up I remember that KRAZAM Microservices video, "because Bingo knows everyone's name-o". (https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ)

A random aside, definitely the very worst name you can give any product is "Atlas". I once worked on a product called "Atlas" that also used a library and an unrelated external API also called "Atlas".

I wonder if that's the point, and why certain people use weird names for things. They're senior engineers, they get a nice salary, it's rational (albeit not in the interest of their employer) to prevent their job getting taken over by a junior developer. So they have to set up roadblocks, moats, barriers to entry etc., and weird service names are one such barrier.

In general team members are going to look after their own interests (e.g. set up roadblocks), but if this sort of stuff goes on it shows bad engineering leadership within the company, as it's the leadership's responsibility to stamp down on this sort of behaviour.

I was really hoping we'd all be mature enough to not have this petty argument over when people studying the properties of chemicals stopped being called "alchemists" and started being called "chemists". What year was that, exactly? Exactly. I need an exact year, so I don't make this "mistake" again, please. Because otherwise, I think "early chemists" is a perfectly accurate description of early humans studying the properties of chemicals.

> Early chemists gave cutesy names to chemicals, like "vitriol", "salt", and "cholesterol". Today we know the proper descriptive names for these substances, of course.

That's not what happened, and nobody is saying that the chemical serialization is the "correct" name. The reality is that originally we didn't know the internal structure of these chemicals or understand how they functioned: referring to something as an acid didn't matter because we didn't understand how acids worked. The naming grew as our understanding of the function grew.

But, critically, the old names are still useful in some contexts, because the chemicals serve different functions in different contexts. Nutritionists don't necessarily need to know that Vitamin C is an acid, and they certainly don't need to know the exact chemical structure of cholesterol. In fact, it's telling that your chemical structure actually is just one form of cholesterol, because cholesterol is a group of chemicals, not one chemical.

More fundamentally, naming the structures of chemicals is different from naming services, because chemicals don't change. Sulfuric acid will always be H2SO4, and it will always react the same given the same conditions. That's not true of services.

> See, the problem is that what's "descriptive" is opinionated, and a hot topic for bikeshedding.

Sure... but the answer is just "don't do that". If you spend 30 hours a week arguing over whether something is a "adapter" or a "converter" that's a waste of time, because those terms are both pretty similar. No one is saying that's a good idea. That doesn't mean that we should just throw up our hands and name the object "SamuelLJackson", it means we should give things the most descriptive name we can come up with in, say, 30 seconds. Which, for something that changes objects from one format to another, isn't SamuelLJackson.

Part of the problem I'm seeing here is that people seem to be concerned that name changes are a waste of time. That's true to some extent, but having to figure out what a poorly-named entity does is a much larger waste of time. And if it isn't, I have to ask, why is changing names taking so long? Perhaps it's a lack of tests? Poor editor tooling? Whatever it is, fix whatever is making your names hard to change, don't give up on descriptive names.