Clean Code: Names

This chapter was all about naming things. It is argued that naming things is important because we name basically every piece of… physical thing we produce as programmers: variables with names inside functions with names inside classes with names inside files with names inside folders/modules with names. Once you realize that then it gets harder to argue against the importance of names. These were my notes:

Good (variable) names:

• Are intention revealing (answer questions)
  • why it exists
  • what it does
  • how it is used
• Avoid disinformation
  • similar things look smilar (and different things don’t)
  • only one word is used per concept (single concept does not have different names in different places)
• Make meaninguful distinctions
  • and insert no ‘noise’ (prefixes/suffixes such as info, object, data)
• Are pronouncable
• Are searchable
• Don’t need encodings (such as whatwasagoodname_str or such as whatwasagoodname_float)
• Don’t need mental mapping

Naming things

• Class names should be nouns or noun-phrases
• Mehtod names should be verbs or verb-phrases

Naming in general

• Don’t be cute say what you mean, mean what you say
• Don’t pun (have one word mean more than one thing)

• When naming, if name exists in solution domain then use that name else it is ok to use name from problem domain

• Context is helpful for naming
  • Context can be created using data structures such as classes.