Anyone else find naming classes and methods one of the most difficult parts in programming? [closed]

Answer 1

Why not HelpDocumentServiceClient kind of a mouthful, or HelpDocumentClient...it doesn't matter it's a vendor the point is it's a client to a webservice that deals with Help documents.

And yes naming is hard.

Answer 2

Invest in a good refactoring tool!

Answer 3

What you are doing now is fine, and I highly recommend you stick with your current syntax, being:

context + verb + how

I use this method to name functions/methods, SQL stored procs, etc. By keeping with this syntax, it will keep your Intellisense/Code Panes much more neat. So you want EmployeeGetByID() EmployeeAdd(), EmployeeDeleteByID(). When you use a more grammatically correct syntax such as GetEmployee(), AddEmployee() you'll see that this gets really messy if you have multiple Gets in the same class as unrelated things will be grouped together.

I akin this to naming files with dates, you want to say 2009-01-07.log not 1-7-2009.log because after you have a bunch of them, the order becomes totally useless.

Answer 4

Thread 1:

function programming_job(){
    while (i make classes){
         Give each class a name quickly; always fairly long and descriptive.
         Implement and test each class to see what they really are. 
         while (not satisfied){
            Re-visit each class and make small adjustments 
         }
    }
}

Thread 2:

while(true){
      if (any code smells bad){
           rework, rename until at least somewhat better
      }
}

There's no Thread.sleep(...) anywhere here.

Answer 5

I think this is a side effect.

It's not the actual naming that's hard. What's hard is that the process of naming makes you face the horrible fact that you have no idea what the hell you're doing.

Answer 6

Leo Brodie, in his book "Thinking Forth", wrote that the most difficult task for a programmer was naming things well, and he stated that the most important programming tool is a thesaurus.

Try using the thesaurus at http://thesaurus.reference.com/.

Beyond that, don't use Hungarian Notation EVER, avoid abbreviations, and be consistent.

Best wishes.