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0 pointsdurandal13y ago0 comments

One thing that I've found over and over again, is that if something is hard to name, there is often a problem with the abstraction itself. Most common issue is that the thing that resists naming is doing multiple things and that it should be split up in smaller parts that focuses on something small that can be simply named.

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mumblemumble3y ago

I've also discovered that the problem with the abstraction itself that the naming difficulty is pointing out might be the mere fact that this abstraction exists in the first place.

We've got such a fetish for reusability that it often overwhelms any care we might have given to comprehensibility.

pydry3y ago

I usually find in every project that there are few terms that are overloaded to mean multiple conflicting things.

On one project it was so bad that every time a particular word was used in conversation I had a mini freak out because it essentially referred to six related but very distinct things. I had to figure out which one people meant, assuming they even knew themselves.

It wasn't like these things were subtypes of that word either. The word had just been bastardized beyond recognition.

I tried to make up six new meaningful names and "ban" anybody from using the original word but it didn't stick particularly well. We never did manage to exorcize the original word from the code base, so it hung around misleading people.

It did lead to bad abstractions but the root of the problem wasn't the abstractions themselves but the fact that this word was used so indiscriminately and inappropriately.

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