41–50 of 86 posts
I once worked for a company that decided to eliminate internal codenames and instead use the actual brand names used by our customers. It removed a barrier to communication with no undesirable side effects. Thank you Tim! You did us a solid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Affordable housing where I live is a specific thing. Below-market-rate housing purchaseable/rentable with specific income requirements. Some number of units in new builds are usually required to meet this requirement. Your example sounds similar, it is also specifically defined and not just housing that is affordable but rather it meets specific requirements.
A cross-country flight to a pilot licence is a flight that goes greater than 50 nautical miles one-way. During flight training you need some number of these so you talk about them a lot during that training and it's mentioned a lot in the regulations.
And as I guess you're aware secure computation is also a term of art in CS for a specific thing.
I'm sure every field has terms of art that overlap with things whose words don't precisely describe. A chef's knife is a specific shape/class of knife, not any knife used by a chef. Law is full of them. There is a wealth of examples.
The article is about (position, move) pairs. Why not call these objects "steps"?
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…
Unlike acronyms, good code words have some emotions attached to them, maybe some backstory or theme. For example, Android versions are alphabetically ordered desserts, there is some consistency to it. When first told, you can picture it in your head, even taste it, this can help with memorization as it is not just a random 3-letter string. Even with the nonsensical "kep", it has a nice sound to it, and in fact, I have memorized it, it is a combination of a hmm... chess stuff and... san? (looking up) oh yes, EPD and SAN.
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 prefer code names over acronyms. Like code names, acronyms are meaningless to the uninitiated, but for me code names are more memorable. Here, I don't know what "EPD" or "SAN" mean and these are terms I have to get familiar with when reading the code base, just like "kep". I get that EPD and SAN are probably familiar terms to chess people, but the idea there is never a code base where you don't have to get familar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
No, it's not just the computer world. Affordable housing where I live is a specific thing. Below-market-rate housing purchaseable/rentable with specific income requirements. Some number of units in new builds are usually required to meet this requirement. Your example sounds similar, it is also specifically defined and not just housing that is affordable but rather it meets specific requirements. A cross-country flig…
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 regularly cannot remember if its "grep" or "greb". Never had this issue with Windows' "findstr".
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…
Give me unique and memorable over generic-looking-with-the-merest-bit-of-information.
Used to work at a place where every repo, every service, etc was all CompanyShortNameThingDoerServiceRequester and similar, surprisingly unhelpful. I don’t want the 100th CompanyDataIngesterService because they all blur into one.
At least if someone goes “oh yeah the Oyster service will give that to you” we know precisely which one we mean.
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?