Naming Things | Hacker News Reader

Naming Things

blog.flavioribeiro.com

34 pointsflavioribeiro24 comments

So. Many. Bad. Names.

The whole Travis/Jenkins/Hudson thing baffles me. Yes, they're all butlers. I can never remember which one is which. And since I'm English, butlers represent the worst of the old, deferential world, the world I spend half my life fighting against... and that's precisely why IMHO they're unsuitable names for anything open-source.

"therubyracer". It's something to do with Ruby. It's presumably quite fast. This isn't telling me much.

But then, I've released a fair amount of shockingly badly named stuff myself, so I should stop here. Other than to improve on the quote that begins TFA:

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."

I get why Jenkins kept the butler theme, seeing as it was a fork of Hudson by some of the main developers. But yeah, it can cause confusion.

"therubyracer" is a pun; if you know that it is a wrapper around "V8", which can refer to a car engine, it is easy enough to remember.

When I switched away from MS Office apps to Apple's equivalents, it was such a pain googling for help in "Numbers" and "Pages". The app names are so generic it was frustrating finding relevant results.

How do I "insert page numbers in Pages"?

How do I "round down in Numbers"?

Edit: I guess "Word" is not much better.

Prefixing the application's name has usually helped in my searches. For example, "round down in apple numbers". Smaller scale applications I've had more trouble with though: almost any search for help with Sketch returns a ton of results for SketchUp.

Coincidently, I was investigating Sketch last week. I ran into the same issue. I ended up using "Sketch App" in my queries with mixed results. Similar to your suggestion, I also tried tacking on "Bohemian" -- as in Bohemian Coding -- the app's developers.

With Word and the like you can put 'ms' in front at least. The biggest issue I have when searching (for things I don't know the proper name for) is when punctuation is part of the search. Even with quotes it seems to ignore question marks and exclamation points and it feels really unnatural to type 'exclamation exclamation' for a search.

Web search for programmers:

http://www.symbolhound.com/

Yeah, but when googling back then you would do msword.

Indeed... How do people google stuff like C or Go ?

When I studied Go I found that searching for "golang" instead worked well.

C is a highly famous language, so it's actually really easy. Biggest problem might be to get irrelevant results for C++, in that case you just use search operators and wrap "C" in quotation marks.

Fun fact: Streams-analyzer, EvoHandler and their ilk are recognized by the reputable compendium of general knowledge that TVTrope is: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NounVerber

NounVerber, hehehe... this is a term I didn't know. thank you for sharing this.

Wikipedia Random is the best name generator ever:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Naming that special machine that...: Rolling... "Troisdorf"

Naming that web project project...: Rolling... "Mimeresia cellularis"

Works like a charm (sometimes I just roll three times for one name).

"Code Complete" by Steve McConnell has the best advice on naming classes, ,methods and variables that I have read (don't have the book handy here, so can't give examples right now).

You should check out my little site about naming stuff: http://namingschemes.com

"Marmota" is definitely a cool name for software. However, it isn't just Portugese; it's also the scientific name for a genus of rodents (marmots) that includes groundhogs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmot

When I named my apps, I just tried to come up with the most descriptive name possible. ("MDB Viewer", "PG Commander"). I really want people who look at search engine result pages and app store listings to immediately recognize what my app is good for.

Great article, good naming is powerful but it is damn hard.

Lately, I've been working on a project called Office Garden (officegarden.lu). It's interesting to see how people react to my pitch depending on when I give the app's name.

Even after visiting your website, I have no idea what Office Garden actually is or does. Maybe I'll find out if I enter my e-mail address into your form...

But then again, maybe not, and my email would end up on yet another list I don't want.

Well you're right, it's still in private beta so I didn't put much information about it on the homepage.

Office Garden is a platform where employees from the same company get to know each other, have fun and share their interests. We deeply believe that happy employees build more successful businesses.

At most of my jobs, I'd have been happier if I didn't know my co-workers.

This is always hard even when naming variables, functions, and classes. I always try to be as verbose as possible and sometimes spend like 10 minutes just pondering of a name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com