Shameful Names

2007-08-20 • , , , • Comments

There’s a lots of good positive advice out there on how programmers should name classes, functions, variables and so on. To help balance things out are three half-baked tips on how not to name things.

  • Don’t use m_something for member variables. Prefer something. If there’s any doubt about a variable’s scope your code blocks are too long. Besides, you can always qualify a member variable’s scope like this->something1.
  • Utility is a poor name for a module. And yes, the same goes for utilities and util.
  • Don’t create a class called SomethingManager when plain old Something would do. Why? Because “manager” is a long word and I’ll bet class instance names get abbreviated to something_mgr. Because you’ll end up with source code with too many managers and not enough workers 2. And because eventually you’ll find yourself needing a SomethingManagerManager.

One thing I like about Scheme is that you can use punctuation characters in identifiers. Question marks work well in predicates (rather than is_empty, write empty?), and an exclamation mark alerts readers to functions with side-effects (set!, for example).

1 I can understand C++ programmers objecting to the explicit self Python requires for member access. The objection becomes less easy to understand if they adopt the m_something naming convention.

2 Now that I think about it, my real objection is to object oriented code-bloat. Too many managers = too deep a heirarchy = not enough action. Think of JBoss and shudder.