indrajeetpatil / second-hardest-cs-thing

Thoughts on how to name things for software development

Dealing with the Second Hardest Thing in Computer Science

This presentation summarizes my understanding of best practices in naming things for software development.

The title is inspired by the following quote:

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."
- Phil Karlton

The slides can be seen here:
https://indrajeetpatil.github.io/second-hardest-cs-thing/

Feedback

I'd love to hear thoughts and comments here.

Code of Conduct

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second-hardest-cs-thing's Issues

Don't encode implementation details in the names

E.g. bonuses_df for data frame and bonuses_dt for data table. Should just be bonuses.

Also add advice on naming files?

Names should be easily distinguishable

h/t Kernighan and Plauger (1974)

N   = k
NN  = k ^ 2
NNN = k ^ 3 

Link to Ottinger's guidelines

https://exelearning.org/wiki/OttingersNaming/

Dedicated slide on Hungarian notation?

Add more meta tags

Avoid redundancy

For class Router, defining a method named run_router() is redundant. Router.run() is clear enough.

Naming test functions

Use Python example

Include advice on naming custom data types

Talk about best practices for tab completion friendly names

Suggested by Michael Chirico

Expound on choosing names from problem domain

Talk about choosing the right abstraction level while naming

Don't call parameters value_before and value_after just because the calling functions uses it in that context.
The more general and abstract value1 and value2 are better.

Distinguish naming globals versus locals

Discuss how names can be used to track dependencies between statements