Paul Jones has a new post to his site today talking about the importance of naming when it comes to the use of different patterns in development. He also makes some recommendations to help clear up some of the confusion around different names for the same things.

[Thoughts in a] Grumpy Programmer mailing-list essay got me thinking. [...] I completely agree with the emphasis on using a common vocabulary. One issue here is that naming things properly is very, very hard. It is one of the only two hard problems in programming. Are there any rules (even rules-of-thumb) that can we use to make it easier to pick good names for the classes and concepts in our projects?

He reminds readers that code is no place for a "novel context", that is that it's not meant to be instructions for humans, but instructions for computers. He points out that patterns are more about behavior than the name you give them and that picking a name that's "close enough" isn't a good idea. He also recommends that you avoid picking a name for a special context the code might be involved in.