I'm not knocking the article, but endless aesthetic discussions like this are one of the reasons why I can't wait to leave the industry. The very definition of bike-shedding.
compare acquire and take_ownership
Who cares!? Those are both great names for a function...
If you put 10 software engineers in a room, you'll get 10 different answers to any question. Every company you work for will be filled with endless "smart guys", ready to spring in to action and nitpick you to death about arbitrary things.
It's exhausting.
We need more languages that come with rigid rules for things like style, so we can stop wasting time and get on with solving problems.
Naming things sensibly and doing so consistently is pretty important in designing software because names are relied on to convey meaning. Sensible naming helps people. Bad and inconsistent naming confuses people.
Naming matters more for interface types and APIs than for local variables.
"acquire" and "take_ownership" might be equally good names for an operation, but you should pick one and stick to it throughout the codebase. And it would make sense to poll other people about what they think is a good name. Especially if you don't really care one way or another. Other people may have valid perspectives or they may just be better at expressing meaning through names.
You can't really nail everything down in the official style guide for a language without it becoming baroque and oppressive. If you want to avoid bikeshedding, have a process in place for choosing naming conventions. Name someone as the arbiter. If consensus cannot be reached within a reasonable amount of time, the arbiter decides. It might help to keep a record of naming choices so people understand the reasoning behind why certain practices are chosen.
Most programming is a social activity in that multiple people will have to deal with the code. Not caring about something as essential as naming, and wanting to avoid effort because you don't care, can be seen as a kind of anti-social behavior.
On well functioning teams I've worked on, naming tends to not be a big issue because over time a team develops a common vocabulary. When in doubt, ask someone else on the team how they interpret a name.
I agree that consistency is what’s important. If almost everything in the codebase roughly follows the same API then it takes less effort for people to use the various parts
Yep, it gets tedious. It really grates on me when reviewers are willing to die on a hill over some minutia while the codebase is in tatters. Arguing over extremely minor duplication while there exists two, active, physical copies of an application in separate repos (a real example) is the most pennywise poundfoolish waste of time and it drives me crazy.
I once spent 8 months merging a codebase with almost every single function duplicated three times, and all that was required for each (most of the time) was another parameter, one conditional in function, and all 3 could be merged.
So I did that! And at the same time cleaned up the code, fixed bugs, and adding required new functionality, and all while merging in constant change from the main codebase.
After reducing a 1M line codebase to 280k lines, when almost done, after that 8 months, I was asked "how much longer".
My response of "a month for testing" was apparently too long for the new manager, who turfed all those fixes, including the new functionality.
And I wasn't even behind schedule, I was ahead.
Once abandoned, everyone just copy and pasted my changes... in triplicate, into the old codebase.
While I share your frustration, I think leaving the industry because of it is an overreaction. It's fairly easy to just ignore the aesthetic discussions and focus on solving problems. Whenever someone brings up renaming a function from perfectly_good_name_1 to perfectly_good_name_2 in code review, I immediately agree without discussion and move on with my life.
>It's fairly easy to just ignore the aesthetic discussions and focus on solving problems.
You probably know this but for discussion's sake: in many modern forges, your pull request can't be merged unless the comments have been resolved/closed. So you basically cannot ignore these "feedback" items; you have to engage the comment whether that means actioning it or refuting it.
I currently work with the worst pedant I've encountered in my career to date, and I can empathise with wanting to leave the industry.
Maybe a more accurate phrasing would be, "Can't wait to retire and do literally anything else with my time, including writing programs with which I answer to no one about coding style.", Hah.
I agree that "Who cares!" should be the default response here, as long as it's clear, but I think some folks (especially in engineering) think that "more rules = more clear," or "if we encode all of this information in the variable name, the variable name will always be clear," which is an error in thinking this particular article seeks to correct.
I have actually been in the throes of battle with co-workers over relaxing our variable naming standards because they are too damn prescriptive, which (in my opinion) reduces code clarity, while also setting up conflicts between those who think code should be as clear as possible in the file versus those who think that we should follow the standard even though we know it to be flawed and produce overly-verbose code.
My core argument is very much "who cares as long as it's clear" but having a specific piece of ammo where I can say "here are several arguments specifically against our current style" may convince some of these folks to loosen up a little bit. The bike-shedding is indeed ridiculous; going back and forth in Swarm for days over names for code that has fundamental algorithmic flaws. Awful stuff.
Ever dealt with a rotating code review that passes through multiple hands? It's funny watching the principal architect and technical fellow ask me to refactor my code again to remove the changes that the other one asked me to make!
I spent a month in one such code review.
No wonder management hates listening to engineers. If we have a good point to make, they ignore it because of the last 3 engineers who wasted time with stylistic, pedantic arguments.
What we used to do is announce in our team chat: "anyone around for a round of bikeshedding? I need to name a thing". The thing being named is usually not user facing, so it was more of a team building exercise than anything related to compliance or style. We would get it done in a few minutes and never discuss this name again, because we already had this discussion.
The actual names that came out of these exercises are generally pretty good, and often a shorter name would win over a longer one.
> We need more languages that come with rigid rules for things like style, so we can stop wasting time and get on with solving problems.
This is where I'm at now.
Decades ago, I was an "only spaces, no tabs" guy. Still am to an extent. But what made me more open was realizing it wasn't spaces or tabs specifically that mattered, only that code is readable, and consistently formatted code is more readable. Seeing things like `gofmt`, which mix tabs and spaces, and comes with the language? Your debate about spaces versus tabs is over, now we can get back to tackling real problems, and your code will be rejected at CI if it isn't run through the standard formatter. Same thing with `black` for Python.
Above all else, be consistent. I can understand hate for "standard" language libraries that have functions with wildly different naming schemes or input and output arguments that aren't consistent - those should DIAF (looking at you, PHP "standard" library). But as to the names themselves? Doesn't particularly matter much. Unless you're the Bruce Tognazzini of API design, you probably don't have anything of substance to back up why it should be "make_" versus "create_".
Consistency is table stakes. It doesn't override the need for good decisions, it's just the baseline. A consistently applied bad decision is still a bad decision.
Tabs vs spaces is a great example, since tabs are just better ( :) ). The attempts to control how others view the code are frankly bizarre. Why not go all the way and control the typeface, font size, and syntax highlighting by sharing code via screenshots?
Let everyone choose their preferred indentation size, it's not only polite, but also an accessibility concern.
Aren't you still doing the same thing though? You have your arbitrary rules and they're absolutely truths... until you change your mind about them. Except before the rule was "only space no tabs" and now it's "be consistent"?
I was once at a software conference where Bjarne Stroustrup was givnig some presentations, and in the after-session questions, I thought I'd ask about something that had been bugging me about software design in general — I'd found myself spending what I thought might be excessive time to designing naming systems for the projects I worked on, and I wondered what he thought about spending time on naming conventions.
With no hesitation, he said "Not at all, naming is very important", and very useful to get right up front, even for solo projects, as good clear naming helps speed the entire building and maintenance.
So, yes, both "acquire" and "take_ownership" are relatively synonymous, but one will clearly be better and more consistent with the other in the context of your naming system. And this will matter to at least some serious devs.
(But YMMV; if you have tried it a couple times and found it doesn't help you a bit, then you probably shouldn't spend more time on it)
Automatic style formatters solve a lot of this discussion. Not all, such as the naming example here, but at least things like whitespace and line wrapping never have to be a discussion point again if you have the rule that whatever the style formatter outputs is what you use
A particular gripe of mine is the tendency for some code reviewers to nitpick code golf solutions that don’t really improve clarity, maintainability, or quality (and might arguably reduce them). Going from 40 characters to 30 characters for a functionally equivalent statement isn’t a win worth mentioning in my book.
Bikeshedding is prevalent in every popular area of human study, because it's easy to talk and write about. It's not representative of what matters to those who get the job done.
Attitude is, if I can argue with someone and have it in a fun productive way - even if we don’t tackle most important thing we should work on at the moment - it still might be valuable.
If I have to deal with smartass that nitpicks on variable names, he wastes my energy and any will to do further work for the day or if it is more heated and goes over some “Astro architecture” might even burn my willpower to do any work till the end of the week.
Not surprisingly (as the OP), I disagree. Good names help people understand concepts; bad names confuse. Choosing good names is not merely aesthetics, it's bringing clarity, meaning, and culture.
That said, in this particular case, I think Russ could have chosen a better example. Neither "acquire" nor "take_ownership" are terrible. But when you're a language designer (like Russ), the names you choose shape people's code and their thinking for the next 10, 20, even 50 years. When you're a library designer (many of us are), it might only be a few years, but still.
I think as code reviewers we should take this as seriously as the context demands: for internal names and local variables, it's not too important. For public API names, very important. For language changes, extremely important.
Some good quotes from Bob Nystrom, author of "Crafting Interpreters":
I don't disagree that things like function naming are important.
I understand that it's important to think critically about the philosophical North stars of your work. This is precisely what it means to be an "expert".
I appreciate the work you're doing adding your voice to the discussion.
That being said, it doesn't change the fact that, for me, it's tiring working in a profession where nothing is "real". There is never going to be an end to these kinds of discussions, because everything is abstract, relative, and ever-changing.
Unlike many other professions grounded in the limitations of physical reality: carpentry, civil engineering, hair cutting, etc, Software Engineering is a house of cards of artificial abstractions. The tools and architectural patterns are mostly free from physical constraint, so they can change at will, and they do.
What is "good" is highly dependent on context, and in our case that context is fluid, changing along every dimension all the time, making it very hard to establish a shared understanding of any given problem.
This translates into a work culture where there is always room for debate about what to do, since there is almost never an objective best next step. And debate we do.
I don't consider myself a great programmer, but I do think I do two things well. One is solve problems. Like a dog with a bone I become obsessive about figuring something out. The other is I don't care about style, and will happily fit the existing style. For me, it's consistency above all else. I agree completely with you that arguments around style are exhausting.
Entirely this. I have a preferred style when I'm writing my own code. When I'm writing code for someone else, though, I will roll with whatever the house style is[1].
I just want consistency and predictability. Once I know the naming scheme, I should be able to take a really good guess as to what any given function or variable name is by knowing what they do, and vice versa.
[1] I consider it a red flag if a company doesn't have an established house style. It matters not what the style consists of, only that it exists and is mostly adhered to.
The latter is probably a better name if there are other functions involving "ownership" (give_ownership, split_ownership, etc.), but otherwise you're right.
then there needs to be a way to split ownership other than an equal 2-way split and you're fucked.
I haven't seen this exact situation, but I've seen stuff like this. And sometimes, I was the programmer.
Names should be as short as possible while still being meaningful AND keeping in mind future work requirements.
On a tangent, I'm always frustrated when as a developer, I don't learn much about the actual business. There's always a situation down the road where if you had known what the company was planning on doing in the next quarter, or couple years, you could have saved everyone some work by doing things differently.
"We need more languages that come with rigid rules for things like style, so we can stop wasting time and get on with solving problems."
I have the complete opposite opinion. Most software engineers are obsessed with style, and I don't think accommodating it is the right solution. I think the right idea is just not enforcing any stylistic rules at all (while obviously keeping the readability and maintainability-related rules) and just let everyone write code how they want, while forcing them to tolerate other people's coding, naming, brace placement, etc. styles.
> Who cares!? Those are both great names for a function...
The source code has two purposes - to be processed (compiled/interpreted) by software, and to be read by humans. While it is relatively clear what is considered good code for the first purpose, it is harder to say what it is for the second one.
An essay could be written in an elegant style or be full of clumsy wordings and hard to understand sentences, despite having the same meaning. The same is true for source code.
In my experience, getting N software engineers in a room produces exactly N different answers only if you don't allow them to debate further. If you do, the upper bound on the number of different answers seems to be is at least 3N.
Another place where naming matters, but for slightly different reasons, is on the command line. If you are naming a program that someone is going to spend much of their time running from the command line, it is nice if you put some thought into how the binary is named.
For instance. I've never been able to understand why something like `systemctl` could be so clumsily named. If you have to do sysadmin work, sometimes you will be using the command a lot. If we ignore the fact that I see more and more people typing out entire commands without the use of completion, `systemctl` lacks a short, unique prefix and ends up being quite awkward to type.
On my system `sys` is the prefix for 26 commands, and `system` is the prefix for 24 commands. So I end up having to type 7 keystrokes to type systemctl on my system with completion. Sure, I could alias it, but then I'd have to replicate it everywhere, plus I'd be forming habits that just cause more frustration later.
Another way to fail is to choose a prefix that has bad typing flow. For instance I wrote a program that has the prefix "aq". Try to type it. Awkward, isn't it?
(If you don't think any of this matters, perhaps you shouldn't be the one to pick names for programs that are run on the command line).
> However, I think the more common mistake is using names that are overly long.
But the most productivity-sapping mistake is names that are too vague.
The idea that "names should be as short as possible while still being clear" is a truism I don't think anyone disagrees with. But it's a balance that nobody ever perfectly gets right.
So if you're going to err, it's better to err on the side of clarity rather than shortness. E.g. lines like:
fetcher = repolib.IndexFetcher(args.arch)
counts = collections.Counter()
for file in repo.files:
Would be better as:
repo_fetcher = repolib.IndexFetcher(args.arch)
file_counts = collections.Counter()
for repo_file in repo.files:
It's far more helpful when a line of code tells you what it's doing not just in terms of programming logic but in terms of the purpose of the code, the contextual nouns and verbs. It saves a lot of mental effort when reading and debugging.
If we're debating style anyway I'd argue using agent nouns as a class name is a worse offence. Compare
index = RepositoryIndex(args.architecture)
statistics = RepositoryStatistics()
for repository in index.retrieve_repositories():
for repository_file in repository.files:
statistics.increment_file_count(repository_file.name)
This is still mostly equivalent to the original, but a lot easier to read and pretty much every word removed from the name can be inferred from the type.
It can be made even less verbose but at this point there's no real need.
Naming things should be as short as possible while still being clear, unless the context of the situation makes a longer name solve some other problem.
Naming things should be short as possible while still being clear, unless making it longer helps something else.
Name things short as possible while still clear, unless longer helps something else.
Name short as possible while clear, unless longer is better.
Every code base where naming still matters is a code base that is sprouting new functions.
What was “clear” two years ago may be unclear today because we have four times as many functions. Via the pigeonhole principle, there are no short names that are sufficiently clear, and as X goes to infinity even the medium ones become problematic.
Use a modern IDE with autocomplete. Try to make the beginning of your names as unique as possible. Few people will have to type in the suffixes.
Used to be we would ask other developers what book they would buy all of their coworkers. Answers have changed over time, anything from Brooks to Gamma. But for my money, I would buy them a thesaurus.
If you use the same word in two places in the code, they should be sharing code and data structures. If they don’t, you should use a synonym. Never recycle names, and be sure you aren’t recycling. Many people are wrong here, claiming two things are the same but with no code shared, and in many cases I’ve seen, using two different definitions of the same word.
Properly communicating when a requested change is optional is actually one of the most important code review skills you can have.
By default, developers assume that a requested change is mandatory. So as a reviewer, it's up to you to explain the difference between a change you're suggesting because it's more concise to use a list comprehension instead of a loop vs a change you're requiring because the change list introduces a race condition that will cause customers to lose money.
If you do that, you'll make everyone you work with happier
We prefix any comment or request with "nit", as in "nitpick" when the reviewer knows they are being picky but it's still something worth mentioning.
The coder in that case knows they can ignore that without consequence if their preference or perspective is different. The reviewer also knows that and doesn't feel bad if that advice is ignored.
It's been helpful for me because I'm a picky reviewer and feel compelled to mention things that my years of experience tell me are "wrong." But I've also come to realize it's often not wrong, just not as good for potentially non-obvious reasons. But my devs will never learn the potentially "better" way if I don't point it out. So "nit" gives me a way to communicate and teach without the pressure of the dev needing to make an immediate change.
Same! I also, if I notice I'm leaving a lot of constructive comments, deliberately try to leave some positives ones too. Like "Nice! Glad we're adding typing here". Just as important to promote positive habits as discouraging negative ones.
I think one problem with first problem is that names are not going to live forever just as the code. Lots of times code will be scrapped, a lot of times code will just run and no one will ever mind changing it.
So I’d say amount of time invested in naming won’t payback.
It’s very hard to change stuff that has grown beyond your control. Local variable names? Sure. API names? That’s a major version break. Correcting the “Referer” header? Unthinkable for 27 years and counting.
Using Golang as an example of naming conventions is questionable - this is a language where single letter variable names are idiomatic.
I feel like the author missed the obvious; a name should reduce cognitive load as much as possible. Length is one factor that is relevant to this goal, but not the only factor.
When a name is too long, this is usually a design issue, not a stylistic issue, i.e. writing Swiss Army functions.
Also, takeOwnership is not inferior to acquire, it's just about a wash.
Readit News
If you put 10 software engineers in a room, you'll get 10 different answers to any question. Every company you work for will be filled with endless "smart guys", ready to spring in to action and nitpick you to death about arbitrary things.
It's exhausting.
We need more languages that come with rigid rules for things like style, so we can stop wasting time and get on with solving problems.
Naming matters more for interface types and APIs than for local variables.
"acquire" and "take_ownership" might be equally good names for an operation, but you should pick one and stick to it throughout the codebase. And it would make sense to poll other people about what they think is a good name. Especially if you don't really care one way or another. Other people may have valid perspectives or they may just be better at expressing meaning through names.
You can't really nail everything down in the official style guide for a language without it becoming baroque and oppressive. If you want to avoid bikeshedding, have a process in place for choosing naming conventions. Name someone as the arbiter. If consensus cannot be reached within a reasonable amount of time, the arbiter decides. It might help to keep a record of naming choices so people understand the reasoning behind why certain practices are chosen.
Most programming is a social activity in that multiple people will have to deal with the code. Not caring about something as essential as naming, and wanting to avoid effort because you don't care, can be seen as a kind of anti-social behavior.
On well functioning teams I've worked on, naming tends to not be a big issue because over time a team develops a common vocabulary. When in doubt, ask someone else on the team how they interpret a name.
Yep, it gets tedious. It really grates on me when reviewers are willing to die on a hill over some minutia while the codebase is in tatters. Arguing over extremely minor duplication while there exists two, active, physical copies of an application in separate repos (a real example) is the most pennywise poundfoolish waste of time and it drives me crazy.
So I did that! And at the same time cleaned up the code, fixed bugs, and adding required new functionality, and all while merging in constant change from the main codebase.
After reducing a 1M line codebase to 280k lines, when almost done, after that 8 months, I was asked "how much longer".
My response of "a month for testing" was apparently too long for the new manager, who turfed all those fixes, including the new functionality.
And I wasn't even behind schedule, I was ahead.
Once abandoned, everyone just copy and pasted my changes... in triplicate, into the old codebase.
Which took 3 months, instead of 1.
Bah. A year of my life wasted.
Not excusing or defending it, just trying to serve up a reason why it happens.
You probably know this but for discussion's sake: in many modern forges, your pull request can't be merged unless the comments have been resolved/closed. So you basically cannot ignore these "feedback" items; you have to engage the comment whether that means actioning it or refuting it.
I currently work with the worst pedant I've encountered in my career to date, and I can empathise with wanting to leave the industry.
Maybe a more accurate phrasing would be, "Can't wait to retire and do literally anything else with my time, including writing programs with which I answer to no one about coding style.", Hah.
I have actually been in the throes of battle with co-workers over relaxing our variable naming standards because they are too damn prescriptive, which (in my opinion) reduces code clarity, while also setting up conflicts between those who think code should be as clear as possible in the file versus those who think that we should follow the standard even though we know it to be flawed and produce overly-verbose code.
My core argument is very much "who cares as long as it's clear" but having a specific piece of ammo where I can say "here are several arguments specifically against our current style" may convince some of these folks to loosen up a little bit. The bike-shedding is indeed ridiculous; going back and forth in Swarm for days over names for code that has fundamental algorithmic flaws. Awful stuff.
Ever dealt with a rotating code review that passes through multiple hands? It's funny watching the principal architect and technical fellow ask me to refactor my code again to remove the changes that the other one asked me to make!
I spent a month in one such code review.
No wonder management hates listening to engineers. If we have a good point to make, they ignore it because of the last 3 engineers who wasted time with stylistic, pedantic arguments.
The actual names that came out of these exercises are generally pretty good, and often a shorter name would win over a longer one.
I have to come up with many names for things in code every day. I can't imagine the slowdown having to workshop every name would incur...
This is where I'm at now.
Decades ago, I was an "only spaces, no tabs" guy. Still am to an extent. But what made me more open was realizing it wasn't spaces or tabs specifically that mattered, only that code is readable, and consistently formatted code is more readable. Seeing things like `gofmt`, which mix tabs and spaces, and comes with the language? Your debate about spaces versus tabs is over, now we can get back to tackling real problems, and your code will be rejected at CI if it isn't run through the standard formatter. Same thing with `black` for Python.
Above all else, be consistent. I can understand hate for "standard" language libraries that have functions with wildly different naming schemes or input and output arguments that aren't consistent - those should DIAF (looking at you, PHP "standard" library). But as to the names themselves? Doesn't particularly matter much. Unless you're the Bruce Tognazzini of API design, you probably don't have anything of substance to back up why it should be "make_" versus "create_".
Tabs vs spaces is a great example, since tabs are just better ( :) ). The attempts to control how others view the code are frankly bizarre. Why not go all the way and control the typeface, font size, and syntax highlighting by sharing code via screenshots?
Let everyone choose their preferred indentation size, it's not only polite, but also an accessibility concern.
Aren't you still doing the same thing though? You have your arbitrary rules and they're absolutely truths... until you change your mind about them. Except before the rule was "only space no tabs" and now it's "be consistent"?
Serious devs care.
I was once at a software conference where Bjarne Stroustrup was givnig some presentations, and in the after-session questions, I thought I'd ask about something that had been bugging me about software design in general — I'd found myself spending what I thought might be excessive time to designing naming systems for the projects I worked on, and I wondered what he thought about spending time on naming conventions.
With no hesitation, he said "Not at all, naming is very important", and very useful to get right up front, even for solo projects, as good clear naming helps speed the entire building and maintenance.
So, yes, both "acquire" and "take_ownership" are relatively synonymous, but one will clearly be better and more consistent with the other in the context of your naming system. And this will matter to at least some serious devs.
(But YMMV; if you have tried it a couple times and found it doesn't help you a bit, then you probably shouldn't spend more time on it)
Attitude is, if I can argue with someone and have it in a fun productive way - even if we don’t tackle most important thing we should work on at the moment - it still might be valuable.
If I have to deal with smartass that nitpicks on variable names, he wastes my energy and any will to do further work for the day or if it is more heated and goes over some “Astro architecture” might even burn my willpower to do any work till the end of the week.
That said, in this particular case, I think Russ could have chosen a better example. Neither "acquire" nor "take_ownership" are terrible. But when you're a language designer (like Russ), the names you choose shape people's code and their thinking for the next 10, 20, even 50 years. When you're a library designer (many of us are), it might only be a few years, but still.
I think as code reviewers we should take this as seriously as the context demands: for internal names and local variables, it's not too important. For public API names, very important. For language changes, extremely important.
Some good quotes from Bob Nystrom, author of "Crafting Interpreters":
"Names are the structure we impose on the formless sea of bits that is computing." http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2016/06/16/long-names-are-...
"For me, thinking about names is inseparable from the process of design. To name something is to define it." http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2009/06/05/naming-things-i...
I understand that it's important to think critically about the philosophical North stars of your work. This is precisely what it means to be an "expert".
I appreciate the work you're doing adding your voice to the discussion.
That being said, it doesn't change the fact that, for me, it's tiring working in a profession where nothing is "real". There is never going to be an end to these kinds of discussions, because everything is abstract, relative, and ever-changing.
Unlike many other professions grounded in the limitations of physical reality: carpentry, civil engineering, hair cutting, etc, Software Engineering is a house of cards of artificial abstractions. The tools and architectural patterns are mostly free from physical constraint, so they can change at will, and they do.
What is "good" is highly dependent on context, and in our case that context is fluid, changing along every dimension all the time, making it very hard to establish a shared understanding of any given problem.
This translates into a work culture where there is always room for debate about what to do, since there is almost never an objective best next step. And debate we do.
Entirely this. I have a preferred style when I'm writing my own code. When I'm writing code for someone else, though, I will roll with whatever the house style is[1].
I just want consistency and predictability. Once I know the naming scheme, I should be able to take a really good guess as to what any given function or variable name is by knowing what they do, and vice versa.
[1] I consider it a red flag if a company doesn't have an established house style. It matters not what the style consists of, only that it exists and is mostly adhered to.
take_ownership -> acquire (fine at first)
give_ownership -> unacquire (not even a word)
split_ownership -> halfacquire (complete nonsense)
then there needs to be a way to split ownership other than an equal 2-way split and you're fucked.
I haven't seen this exact situation, but I've seen stuff like this. And sometimes, I was the programmer.
Names should be as short as possible while still being meaningful AND keeping in mind future work requirements.
On a tangent, I'm always frustrated when as a developer, I don't learn much about the actual business. There's always a situation down the road where if you had known what the company was planning on doing in the next quarter, or couple years, you could have saved everyone some work by doing things differently.
I have the complete opposite opinion. Most software engineers are obsessed with style, and I don't think accommodating it is the right solution. I think the right idea is just not enforcing any stylistic rules at all (while obviously keeping the readability and maintainability-related rules) and just let everyone write code how they want, while forcing them to tolerate other people's coding, naming, brace placement, etc. styles.
The source code has two purposes - to be processed (compiled/interpreted) by software, and to be read by humans. While it is relatively clear what is considered good code for the first purpose, it is harder to say what it is for the second one.
An essay could be written in an elegant style or be full of clumsy wordings and hard to understand sentences, despite having the same meaning. The same is true for source code.
I agree software need to be basic error free, compilable, buildable and deployable before naming and structuring aesthetics becomes important.
> Who cares!? Those are both great names for a function...
Now the author has written many good quality working software systems, it is natural that they want to talk about next level things.
Again with the hypothetical dichotomies!
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
For instance. I've never been able to understand why something like `systemctl` could be so clumsily named. If you have to do sysadmin work, sometimes you will be using the command a lot. If we ignore the fact that I see more and more people typing out entire commands without the use of completion, `systemctl` lacks a short, unique prefix and ends up being quite awkward to type.
On my system `sys` is the prefix for 26 commands, and `system` is the prefix for 24 commands. So I end up having to type 7 keystrokes to type systemctl on my system with completion. Sure, I could alias it, but then I'd have to replicate it everywhere, plus I'd be forming habits that just cause more frustration later.
Another way to fail is to choose a prefix that has bad typing flow. For instance I wrote a program that has the prefix "aq". Try to type it. Awkward, isn't it?
(If you don't think any of this matters, perhaps you shouldn't be the one to pick names for programs that are run on the command line).
But the most productivity-sapping mistake is names that are too vague.
The idea that "names should be as short as possible while still being clear" is a truism I don't think anyone disagrees with. But it's a balance that nobody ever perfectly gets right.
So if you're going to err, it's better to err on the side of clarity rather than shortness. E.g. lines like:
Would be better as: It's far more helpful when a line of code tells you what it's doing not just in terms of programming logic but in terms of the purpose of the code, the contextual nouns and verbs. It saves a lot of mental effort when reading and debugging.It can be made even less verbose but at this point there's no real need.
Naming things should be short as possible while still being clear, unless making it longer helps something else.
Name things short as possible while still clear, unless longer helps something else.
Name short as possible while clear, unless longer is better.
Name short and clear, unless longer better.
If longer not better, name short & clear.
if_longer_not_better_name_short_clear
ifLongerNotBetterNameShortClear
What was “clear” two years ago may be unclear today because we have four times as many functions. Via the pigeonhole principle, there are no short names that are sufficiently clear, and as X goes to infinity even the medium ones become problematic.
Use a modern IDE with autocomplete. Try to make the beginning of your names as unique as possible. Few people will have to type in the suffixes.
Used to be we would ask other developers what book they would buy all of their coworkers. Answers have changed over time, anything from Brooks to Gamma. But for my money, I would buy them a thesaurus.
If you use the same word in two places in the code, they should be sharing code and data structures. If they don’t, you should use a synonym. Never recycle names, and be sure you aren’t recycling. Many people are wrong here, claiming two things are the same but with no code shared, and in many cases I’ve seen, using two different definitions of the same word.
Deleted Comment
By default, developers assume that a requested change is mandatory. So as a reviewer, it's up to you to explain the difference between a change you're suggesting because it's more concise to use a list comprehension instead of a loop vs a change you're requiring because the change list introduces a race condition that will cause customers to lose money.
If you do that, you'll make everyone you work with happier
The coder in that case knows they can ignore that without consequence if their preference or perspective is different. The reviewer also knows that and doesn't feel bad if that advice is ignored.
It's been helpful for me because I'm a picky reviewer and feel compelled to mention things that my years of experience tell me are "wrong." But I've also come to realize it's often not wrong, just not as good for potentially non-obvious reasons. But my devs will never learn the potentially "better" way if I don't point it out. So "nit" gives me a way to communicate and teach without the pressure of the dev needing to make an immediate change.
Q: Why can't programmers tell Christmas for Halloween?
A: Because OCT 31 = DEC 25.
So I’d say amount of time invested in naming won’t payback.
I feel like the author missed the obvious; a name should reduce cognitive load as much as possible. Length is one factor that is relevant to this goal, but not the only factor.
When a name is too long, this is usually a design issue, not a stylistic issue, i.e. writing Swiss Army functions.
Also, takeOwnership is not inferior to acquire, it's just about a wash.