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Comment by cwp | Hacker News Reader

I think this is actually getting better. A while back there was a trend of choosing the most generic name possible. For example, who though "node" would be a good name for a Javascript runtime? Or that "parse" would obviously be a mobile app backend framework? Yeesh. At least we didn't have a project named "Thing".

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After years of only doing higher level scripting and SQL, I've been trying to learn to program Android recently, and it seems like there are dozens of classes that are all just synonyms for "Thing" or "Action".

And some of the names are reused in Android even though they are in standard Java libraries.

It's probably invisible to people who have been using it all along, but for me, it's absurd and infuriating because almost nothing has a name that places it in a larger context.

Google seems to have a particular issue with naming things.

If you can't name something in a meaningful way, the next best thing is to name it something completely unique, and not just a generic synonym.

Also, if you have created the 20th asynchronous task managing class, please put it in context with all the others - which are deprecated, which are good for what use case, etc.

Alsoalso why do we need "factories" for abstract objects that relate to other abstract objects that are some sort of "thing"?

I have to wonder if some of this has to do with really smart people coming to work at Google, adding something without ever really grokking the whole mess, and then leaving after a couple of years because they got their tour of duty for their resume.

Yeah. Cache invalidation and naming things.

Yes, of course, but (a) it's a joke, not a guide to best practices, and (b) to me, from a kind of Rip Van Winkle perspective, it's ironic because something like Android Studio makes refactoring so much easier.

One can't be expected to get names right on the first draft.

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