#📚Collection#🔖Productivity#🔧Product #〄Language
Naming Things Series
- Naming Things - challenges in naming across fields
- Nominative Bias - bias toward named things
- Concept Handles - unique names for important concepts
- Neologisms - new words
- How language changes meaning - different types of change
- True Names and Mediums - finding the perfect name or medium for an idea
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. - Phil Karlton
Over-optimizing names
From @sethrosen When naming things like tables, always future proof If you sell wine, calling a table “wines” will be confusing when expanding to beer “Beverages” will be confusing when you sell ice “Products” confusing when expand to services recommend tables be called “stuff” or “table1”
Predictable Names
From @moonpolysoft (2022) I used to be a big advocate for software engineers naming their own projects, but now I understand most of us have absolutely no taste and the internal ecosystems of every company ends up a dogs breakfast of star wars, tolkien, comic book and cartoon references.
Terrible Names
Naming Should be Cryptic?
From Software Component Names Should Be Whimsical And Cryptic (2022) I’m probably being overdramatic there, but I hope my point is clear. “Descriptive” names don’t create transparency, they create the illusion of transparency. If you see that something has the name OrderStatusService, you will instinctively assume you know what it is and does, and you will probably be wrong. (Even worse are those ubiquitous diagrams everybody uses to communicate about software, where there’s a box labeled OrdersService with an arrow connecting it to a box labeled OrderStatusService. I don’t understand why anybody draws those. You can just say “The Orders Service asynchronously pushes order ids, ETAs, and statuses to the Order Status Service.” If you draw a diagram instead, anybody who wants to believe that the data flows in the other direction, or is synchronous, or is different data, will look at the diagram and see confirmation.)
Names should be cute not descriptive
Names should be cute, not descriptive (2023) via HN
People Judge Names Too Much
Jargon may have turned parents against social and emotional learning
Various
Related
Naming Things is Hard via HN (2022) - HN discussion mentions the problem of abstractions changing over time
