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You will explore the similarities between writing and coding, and uses writers’ advice to identify different kinds of avoidable bad naming in code. Some class, method, and variable names are so bad that they’re funny, but you’ve still seen them in production code. The second part of the session explores practical techniques for working on better naming, including renaming things. Renaming is even harder because it includes naming things plus other hard things. The final section goes back to writing. The next step after finding better names in code is to write better comments in code, which is almost as hard as naming is.
The surprising thing about naming things well in code is not that it’s hard, but how easy it is to accept bad names. This is a hard problem that’s worth working on, because although you can’t make the naming problem go away, you can learn to write much better code regardless of which technologies you use.
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How to Name Things: The Hardest Problem in Programming
Peter Hilton
Peter Hilton is a software developer, writer, speaker, trainer, and amateur musician. His professional interests are business process management, web application development, functional design, agile software development and documentation. Peter currently consults for Signavio in Berlin, remotely from Rotterdam where he has lived since January 2000. Peter regularly presents at developer conferences and provides the occasional training course.