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Frank de Jonge:
A Case Against Coding Lingo
May 28, 2014 @ 15:54:14

In this new post to Medium Frank de Jonge talks about one of the infamous "two things hard about programming", namely...well, naming things.

The other day I had a small discussion on one of my open-source projects, in this case Flysystem. It was about the smallest thing ever, the name of a method. A method name that was suggested to replace another method name just didn’t feel right to me. It made me wonder why. I came to the conclusion: Using lingo in code should be avoided.

He elaborates a bit on what he means by "coding lingo" and a few general things to think about when naming your methods, variables, etc. His reminders include:

  • Going for clarity
  • Remembering that not everyone is English
  • That it can be excluding
  • It can be limiting

He reminds us that naming doesn't have to be "cool", it just needs to be useful and a developer-focused kind of documentation. He recommends using common names/terms for things, being concrete and avoiding abbreviation. There's a few other recommendations in the post too, so check out the full article for more.

tagged: coding lingo naming convention opinion recommendation

Link: https://medium.com/@frankdejonge/8ffae1a4fa4e


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