In this new post to Medium Frank de Jonge talks about one of the infamous "two things hard about programming", namely...well, naming things.
The other day I had a small discussion on one of my open-source projects, in this case Flysystem. It was about the smallest thing ever, the name of a method. A method name that was suggested to replace another method name just didn’t feel right to me. It made me wonder why. I came to the conclusion: Using lingo in code should be avoided.
He elaborates a bit on what he means by "coding lingo" and a few general things to think about when naming your methods, variables, etc. His reminders include:
- Going for clarity
- Remembering that not everyone is English
- That it can be excluding
- It can be limiting
He reminds us that naming doesn't have to be "cool", it just needs to be useful and a developer-focused kind of documentation. He recommends using common names/terms for things, being concrete and avoiding abbreviation. There's a few other recommendations in the post too, so check out the full article for more.