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February 26, 2022 07:39 pm GMT

The art and difficulty of naming in programming

Important note: (Do not read any of the comments in the tread without solving the challenge described in the article, otherwise you will miss the fun part ^_^).

This article is a follow of my very first and popular article
Every programmer should know these conventions and practices.

So in this article, I'll develop a little more in-depth the point: Give meaningful names.

Giving a meaningful name to our variables, functions, arguments, classes, attributes, and packages is both difficult and an art. Sometimes, and even often, every developer who cares about code quality stumbles upon naming issues. Personally, I can spend a lot of time just thinking about what will the best name for this, and I can choose one, change it later, multiple times until I find one or a colleague helps me to find the one that satisfied me the most, the one that makes me say or think, yeah, that is the perfect name.
Because, the name could drastically change how easily other developers and you (later, in a few years maybe ^_^) will quickly understand your code without necessary reading the details.

To show you that impact, I'll take in a very simple function that is poorly named. And ask you to determine without testing what the function does, and after that, find better names to replace the badly named variables in that function in order to make the function more readable and understandable. It's the function in the picture below, it's written in python.
You can start now, and read the rest of the article after youre done. Are you ready to take the challenge?

So let's go:

Simple function poorly named in python

Congrats, no matter how much time you took to find it, 1year, 1min, or 1seconds, you agree with me that, after youve changed the variable's names with good ones, the function is more obvious to understand.
But you know, in reality, even the poorest developer can't write a code that is that much awful, at least, I hope so. But that doesnt change the fact that, sometimes, finding the right name is tricky. And also hope that Guido van Rossum will never read the code in the picture, otherwise, that could give him terrible head hacks and nightmares. So sorry, it's just for learning purposes ^_^. Don't blame me too much.

We are at the end of this short article. I'll write another one where I'll give more concrete examples. Feel free to add in the comments some real cases of naming issues you faced and which name you finally chose.
I hope you had fun. If the case, dont forget to like and share it with your friend's programmers and follow me to not miss my further articles.


Original Link: https://dev.to/fayomihorace/the-art-and-difficulty-of-naming-in-programming-395o

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