When “naming things” is done right

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17 points·ngruhn··5 comments

> There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

I've always heard it as "only two hard things: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors" but maybe by the time I heard it someone had already made that the popular version, which overshadowed the source quote

Ah breadcrumb... there was a time when it was considered good style to show the user each path they took from the top, so that they know exactly where they are and go back one, two, or multiple steps as they want.

These days you're lucky if you can tell which rectangular/circular/animating stuff on your screen is a button.

kebab-case never made any sense to me until I discovered that what I call a kebab other cultures call a "gyro" (and various other names) and that what I call a skewer, they call a kebab.

Naming Things Right is cultural.

When it comes to programming it's usually based around American English (e.g. in CSS 'colour' (British English) is 'color'), so American cultural context

yes, but for other cultures it will be translated to some arbitrary terms. The first example on this page is "stack" - translating this to german "Stapel" makes sense in the original sense. Translating this to german "Keller" changes the meaning to something like "buffer".

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