231–240 of 563 posts
I agree with the sentiment, though the argument could be made better. It’s not really about good names being descriptive, nor about memorable mnemonics. It’s that modern naming styles tend to overload random English words for no good reason, but just to be cute (which I don’t consider a good reason) or to be evocative of something which it isn’t. One issue with that is that you might have very different connotations…
Is it though? How are you going to differentiate between 10 different variations of http-request-validator repos on GitHub? I think both have their downsides, but making the name super generic sounding is arguably worse. What I don't like about names like zephyr is that they're purely marketing-driven; people end up picking a zephyr over a http-request-validator purely because the name is sounds "cool" to them, even though http-request-validator might actually be the better library. And don't even get me started on people naming their projects random Japanese words.. it's like the equivalent of nicknames that Thai people use, which are just random English words like Ice Cream or Thank You.
Maybe the happy medium is, like you said, names that contain a hint as to what they do, like Actix (actor model). But TBH you kind of still have to look it up to know what it does, there's no way you're just going to infer that. Maybe later on it helps you remember what it was for though.
I can't call my new formula translation language FORTRAN because it's been taken, as have many other names. So now to avoid collisions, it's named after my cat.
> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations. If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libiberty was always my favorite ridiculous name. It was named so you can link it with -liberty.
I believe strongly in this counterargument: https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam... Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so projects will evolve such that they are not accurately descriptive after time. (Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Servic…
- if it’s hard to name, that’s a good sign that you haven’t clearly delineated use case or set of responsibilities for the thing
- best case for a name is that it’s weird and whimsical on first encounter. Then when somebody tells you the meaning/backstory for the name it reveals some deeper meaning/history that makes it really memorable and cements it in your mind
- the single best tech naming thing I’ve encountered (I didn’t come up with it) was the A/B testing team at Spotify naming themselves “ABBA”
Wait till you work in a corporate environment, where Project Fuzzy Mustard triggered a violation of the ElastoFish metric in the Yellow Hills subsystem, leading to a Code Mild Lavender with a side of Pink Sprinkles.
I no shit once worked on 'Project Magenta Lobster'.
I believe strongly in this counterargument: https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam... Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so projects will evolve such that they are not accurately descriptive after time. (Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Servic…
I’ve been told multiple times in multiple jobs that I’m good at naming things, and I love whimsical names. A couple rules I’ve internalized are: - if it’s hard to name, that’s a good sign that you haven’t clearly delineated use case or set of responsibilities for the thing - best case for a name is that it’s weird and whimsical on first encounter. Then when somebody tells you the meaning/backstory for the name it rev…
I believe strongly in this counterargument: https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam... Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so projects will evolve such that they are not accurately descriptive after time. (Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Servic…
> -- Phil Karlton
- https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/19836/has-phil-...
I believe strongly in this counterargument: https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam... Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so projects will evolve such that they are not accurately descriptive after time. (Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Servic…