I’ve been on teams that did generic names, and inevitably you end up with names like “work manager service” - whose work? Then it becomes an acronym, like WPS, and everyone ignores it anyways :)
A made-up name is better than no name
51–60 of 86 posts
Re: A made-up name is better than no name
#52wasn’t a mouthful like MoveFromPosition
PosMove, but nothing wrong with MoveFromPosition either.
I also easily get annoyed by mouthful typing, so I usually do the following: write code in short identifiers and then rename them after I finish.
I wish dev envs could store two representations for an identifier, one short and one long, so one could easily switch between these (and also local/personal ones, or name comments at least). But that’s rocket science for text-based sources.
Re: A made-up name is better than no name
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thank you; I appreciate the explanation. I suppose the cross-country flight is so named as to preclude student pilots flying around and around in small circles to qualify?
I don't know why it's named that way but you need some number of cross-country flights and hours because there are skills that you pick up doing that (several kinds of navigation, fuel management, weather management, flight planning, map reading, etc) that you wouldn't by flying in circles or by spending time in the pattern (looped takeoffs and landings, which you do also need to do a fair amount of but builds a separate set of skills)
Re: A made-up name is better than no name
#54I often remove the vowels, so I'd have probably gone with 'pdSn' as the shorthand for it.
Oh, I really love not reading code like that!
Re: A made-up name is better than no name
#55I 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.
Yah. If your big project has 2 kinds of objects, handles, designators, whatever that are used frequently... and their alternative english names are awkward, long, and/or misleading... give them a short pronounceable name. I endorse this 100%.
Don't do it 15 times, though, because then it's going to slow down onboarding more than the benefit you get.
Re: A made-up name is better than no name
#56Instead 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
No multicoocular O? And try Luwian for a real kick: the cutest script.
Re: A made-up name is better than no name
#57I 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…
I have found Android codenames to be a nightmare. Docs will sometimes refer to a codename, a version, or an SDK level. Why do we need three pointers to the same thing?
Re: A made-up name is better than no name
#58> A Made-up Name is Better Than No Name Perhaps, but a meaningful name is better than an arbitrary made-up name.
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Re: A made-up name is better than no name
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Those are abbreviations, not acronyms.
They are acronyms. Why do you think differently? And acronyms are abbreviations. If you want to argue more you could state they’re initialisms, but SAN is standard algebraic notation so it’s definitely an acronym, while EPD could be argued not, but instead to be an initialism. In any case Wikipedia says it’s not a settled matter so why even argue about it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym
Re: A made-up name is better than no name
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you; I appreciate the explanation. I suppose the cross-country flight is so named as to preclude student pilots flying around and around in small circles to qualify?
I don't know why it's named that way but you need some number of cross-country flights and hours because there are skills that you pick up doing that (several kinds of navigation, fuel management, weather management, flight planning, map reading, etc) that you wouldn't by flying in circles or by spending time in the pattern (looped takeoffs and landings, which you do also need to do a fair amount of but builds a sepa…
"cross-country" has a similar meaning in many contexts, skiing, biking, planes, running, etc. I believe it was originally coined in running and then extended to other pursuits. The 'country' part of the term comes from the sense that means "non-urban land" rather than "geopolitical state".