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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

It's a hard problem. When coding, I have to come up with sufficiently descriptive names for all methods, all internal variables, all classes, all modules to fit those classes in. Sometimes I feel the urge to cheat, to give less than fully descriptive names for things.

Inevitably, this comes back to bite me when I go back to revise the code and find I can't immediately understand what the code is doing, and the first thing I find myself doing is renaming poorly-named constructs.

Congress has very different constraints when naming bills, but the end result is the same, adding the burden of a hard-to-do-right, yet high-visibility responsibility to already-overworked staffers. I'm not surprised at all that the names for most bills are sappy and nondescript.

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> Congress has very different constraints when naming bills, but the end result is the same, adding the burden of a hard-to-do-right, yet high-visibility responsibility to already-overworked staffers. I'm not surprised at all that the names for most bills are sappy and nondescript.

The purpose of bill names, particularly ones on controversial issues, is not to be descriptive, it is to be sales tools. Its better to think of them as brand names than anything else.

>Congress has very different constraints when naming bills, but the end result is the same...

You speak as if they're making an honest attempt to give the bills meaningful and accurate names. They want the former, not the latter. The PATRIOT Act, like the USA FREEDOM Act and many other bills, is purposefully misnomed in an attempt to hide what the bills does and to dissuade voting against it. "You wouldn't vote against patriots or freedom, would you?"

> You speak as if they're making an honest attempt to give the bills meaningful and accurate names.

Even if they did make an honest attempt, it wouldn't solve the problem. It would just increase their workload and open themselves up to political attacks for no real gain.

You don't get the bill you want, you get the bill you can gain support for. Getting any bill onto the floor takes Herculean effort. Honest naming would just hurt these bill's chances.

> It would just increase their workload...

Not at all, a remotely descriptive name would be far easier to fabricate than a hideously contrived backronym. Naming something is nontrivial, as a developer I understand and appreciate that, but that's no excuse for creating misnomers with the express intent of manipulating other people.

> ... and open themselves up to political attacks for no real gain.

That logic would seem to work for any other unethical and/or unpleasant activity, "Everybody else is doing it and I would be disadvantaged if I didn't as well!"

> Honest naming would just hurt these bill's chances.

I highly doubt it, I'm fairly certain bill names are only to mislead the public as there's a pretty clean dichotomy between the two parties in the U.S. and their votes are usually a pretty standard party split.

> The PATRIOT Act [...] is purposefully misnomed in an attempt to hide what the bills does and to dissuade voting against it

When discussing the manipulative nature of the naming of the act in question, its perhaps useful to get the name right: it's not just the PATRIOT Act, its the USA PATRIOT Act, and USA PATRIOT isn't the full name, its an acronym for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism".

I'm reminded of this line from Agents of Shield:

Maria Hill: What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for, Agent Ward?

Grant Ward: Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

Maria Hill: And what does that mean to you?

Grant Ward: It means someone really wanted our initials to spell out "shield."

Wow, that is, appropriately, a tortured backronym.

It's a bad backronym, but it's not misleading.

I would argue that it is.

When coding, I have to come up with sufficiently descriptive names for all methods, all internal variables, all classes, all modules to fit those classes in. Sometimes I feel the urge to cheat, to give less than fully descriptive names for things.

But do you name your method that erases the whole system super_fun_happy_data_protection_enforcement_method()?

By this analogy it would be a protect_data_transport method written by an amateur that has a bunch of nasty race conditions and buffer overflows. You're assuming malice on the part of the politicians when there's really no reason to. Just because we know the implications of the law they passed doesn't mean they would.

Wasn't the original PATRIOT act written before Sept. 11, 2001? The frequency with which laws are named grossly inappropriately suggests something a bit more sinister than incompetence, even if it's not 100% malice.

There are two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -Phil Karlton

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