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A made-up name is better than no name

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Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#31

Post by seabass-labrax »

tshaddox wrote: post #23
efitz wrote: post #8

I really don’t like this idea if you are sharing this code base with anyone else. I work in one of the magnificent seven and the culture here is codename crazy. Everything has code names, of course: every project, every release of every project, every component or subservice of every project, every internal tool, and often minor features that address some one-off problem in any of the above. I am sure that these name…

It depends whether the increased brevity is worth the decreased intuitiveness. Consider that all words and names are made up in order to trade intuitiveness for brevity.

Excellent point; I think there is also an analogy to be made with the linguistic distinction between synthetic and analytic languages. Broadly speaking, analytic languages feature longer sentences with lots of brief, generic words, whereas synthetic languages have shorter sentences in which each word encodes a complex idea (for example, using prefixes or vowel changes). English is towards the middle of the continuum, with both analytical and synthetic characteristics.

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#32

Post by ncallaway »

efitz wrote: post #8

I really don’t like this idea if you are sharing this code base with anyone else. I work in one of the magnificent seven and the culture here is codename crazy. Everything has code names, of course: every project, every release of every project, every component or subservice of every project, every internal tool, and often minor features that address some one-off problem in any of the above. I am sure that these name…

I feel like that complaint is somewhat addressed by the blog post itself:

> Obviously don’t go crazy with it, but it’s a tool I’m happy to have added to the toolbox.

It sounds like your company culture has gone crazy with it, which, yea, I would think it would make it hard to reason about.

I think this kind of naming approach could be...reasonable in a shared code base, if used very sparingly and well documented.

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#33

Post by kaptain »

aragonite wrote: post #29

Instead of "kep", if you want something that visually stands out, there are also lots of fun little symbol-like characters you can use, even when you're dealing with a language where identifiers are limited to ID_Start/ID_Continue (e.g. Javascript, Rust). My favorite collection :) ⴵ ⵛ ꘜ ⵣ ꕤ ꖜ ꘖ ꧮ ⴲ Ⰴ Ⰺ

But how do you discuss code issues verbally with others?

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#34

Post by BWStearns »

efitz wrote: post #8

I really don’t like this idea if you are sharing this code base with anyone else. I work in one of the magnificent seven and the culture here is codename crazy. Everything has code names, of course: every project, every release of every project, every component or subservice of every project, every internal tool, and often minor features that address some one-off problem in any of the above. I am sure that these name…

That's definitely a possible failure mode, but I think it's preferable to having DataProcessingWorker, IngestService, ProcessingService, DataLoader, etc. Because, you eventually end up with all of these names and it's just as hard to guess what happens where as if they were named after fruits.

At least for me having too many names that are nearly semantically identical is worse than names that are a little (or even a lot) weird. We stare at names all day and if everything is named `YourCompanyNameMessageDataProcessingService` searches get annoying and it's easy for your eyes to start to glaze over.

If you name stuff like, say, Shucker, you have to ask "wait, wtf is the Shucker service?" Someone explains "It unwraps the GRPC messages and puts the contents on a queue. It's like shucking an oyster I guess? Yeah, we know it's a dumb name." But now you have a unique handle that's not likely to collide with other services.

If you can find a straight laced informative descriptive name that's unlikely to collide in the future that's great. But I'd take a funky name that immediately makes sense once you explain it (reference/pun/acronym whatever) over some 2010s java-class-name-looking beige blob of text any day.

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#35

Post by deskr »

Disagree, especially using that first name pops into your mind.

Obviously, if it needs a name or would greatly benefit from a name, give it a name. But have it at least somewhat descriptive. EPDSan, Sanepd, ESpair or some other variation is a lot better then "the first thing that comes to mind".

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#36

Post by seabass-labrax »

ketralnis wrote: post #18
serbuvlad wrote: post #9

If it occurs often enough, yes! The human brain finds unexpected or weird words a lot more memorable than expected words. grep is better than find "find-regular-expression" awk is better than "execute-command-on-regular-expression" perl has nothing to do with pearls If it's a common command, concept, function, etc. that appears in may places, give it an odd name! Document it thoroughly! And don't go overboard. When e…

I have a lot of conversations like "There's a technique called 'secure computation', which confusingly is not just computation that is secure", "They're building affordable housing, which confusingly is not housing that is affordable", "I was on a cross-country flight, which confusingly is not a flight that crosses the country". Using a different word entirely can avoid that problem

The UK government defines 'affordable housing' as that which is available for at least 20% below the local market rate. Cross-country flights, at least where I'm from, do indeed cross the country on one axis or very nearly so.

Is it not just the computer world which is the odd one out in coming up with needlessly confusing names?

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#37

Post by aragonite »

kaptain wrote: post #33
aragonite wrote: post #29

Instead of "kep", if you want something that visually stands out, there are also lots of fun little symbol-like characters you can use, even when you're dealing with a language where identifiers are limited to ID_Start/ID_Continue (e.g. Javascript, Rust). My favorite collection :) ⴵ ⵛ ꘜ ⵣ ꕤ ꖜ ꘖ ꧮ ⴲ Ⰴ Ⰺ

But how do you discuss code issues verbally with others?

If you must pronounce them, all the characters I listed are, in fact, pronounceable (as you can verify by googling them & visiting their Wikitionary pages) since they aren't actually symbols but letters from the alphabets of different languages. :)

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#40

Post by Etheryte »

kaptain wrote: post #33
aragonite wrote: post #29

Instead of "kep", if you want something that visually stands out, there are also lots of fun little symbol-like characters you can use, even when you're dealing with a language where identifiers are limited to ID_Start/ID_Continue (e.g. Javascript, Rust). My favorite collection :) ⴵ ⵛ ꘜ ⵣ ꕤ ꖜ ꘖ ꧮ ⴲ Ⰴ Ⰺ

But how do you discuss code issues verbally with others?

"Hey man, I pulled the latest changes and I'm getting sideways Lego brick is undefined, followed by cannot read properties of undefined when reading squiggly prongs."
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