The Trouble With Naming

(Yes, that’s the best I could come up with)

IT [sic] is often said that there are two hard things...

“Cache invalidation

&

Naming”

-- Phil Karlton

But Why?

We know a lot about the former

It’s technical, and it causes horrible bugs

But doesn’t the latter cause horrible bugs too?

And code rot…?

And eventually madness…?

So Are We Missing Something?...

So Clearly we Don’t All Ignore It

But what’s the sales pitch?

Where’s the memo that Carl got that everyone else missed?

What’s the sizzle from a (beautiful? elegant?) name?

“Call it what it does” - Simples

• C.f. Martin Fowler’s Workflows of Refactoring

• One of these is just refactoring to make something read more nicer isn’t it?

• But can we please have some detail about what “Cognitive Load” is?

PLEASE NOTE: I’m not slagging Martin off – he’s a super-bright guy and the workflows are excellent,

it’s just that I think we can take things further, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay further.

Seriously. I mean it.

An Infographic From The Interwebs…

BUT, is that just a reassuringly cold and scientific definition, a reduction perhaps of something that’s actually a bit soft and scary?

Something subjective and therefore hard to define…

and even worse…

…Immeasurable!

a FEELING!!!

… and a bit like

The Parti (Stolen from our “Real” Architect cousins)

But Wait!

Haven’t we just stumbled upon the XP System Metaphor via a terribly circuitous route?

But Wait!

Haven’t we just stumbled upon the XP System Metaphor via a terribly circuitous route?

Yup:o Source of nameso but also a source of conceptso and possibly solutions

So go on, treat yourself.Think of a great name today