Taming names in software development • Hacker News Board

Re: Taming names in software development

#41

Post by xg15 » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 7:32 PM UTC

> I understand exactly what BasicReviewableFlaggedPostSerializer is on my first time seeing it.

Good for the author, I certainly wouldn't. Things I'd have to research in the codebase before understanding the name are:

- what is Post?

- what do Flagged and Reviewable mean here? Are they attributes of the Post or the serializer?

- what does Basic mean? Again, what is this referring to? Is it indicating that the class is some kind of base class for an object hierarchy?

Re: Taming names in software development

#42

Post by jacrys » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 12:22 AM UTC

There are only two hard things in software development:

* naming things

* cache-invalidation

* off-by-one errors

Re: Taming names in software development

#43

Post by aliedginess » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 1:54 AM UTC

In previous projects, data dictionaries helped name things like database tables and columns. In one project, DBA team used ERwin (data modeling software) to maintain a data dictionary and data model.

Are data dictionaries still in use today? Are there open source examples, books, etc. to learn from?

Re: Taming names in software development

#44

Post by hbrn » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #36

Once you understand the domain you're working on and you've architectured your solution in a way that makes sense, only then naming in your code will get right and without much additional effort. Forget about naming, it is a side effect of your understanding of the issue at hand.

Exactly. Variable naming is not an isolated skill you can hone, and the fact that people are treating it like one means they are missing the point.

You won't become a great author by perfecting your grammar instead of storytelling.