Bad Names

re: Bad Names

Thomas Jeyaseelan — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:29:51 GMT

Any class with the word "utilities" seems to be designed to hold a variety of unrelated functions that programmers couldn't find a better place for.

Community Convergence XXVIII

Charlie Calvert's Community Blog — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:39:01 GMT

Welcome to the XXVIII Community Convergence. In these posts I try to wrap up events that have occurred

The Religion of Class Member Prefixing

Peter Ritchie's MVP Blog — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 20:28:53 GMT

The periodic identifier naming/prefixing/Hungarian-notation religions discussion reared its head recently

re: Bad Names

Eric Lippert — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:36:09 GMT

I didn't say that they were "automatically bad". They are not. I said that they were "often a sign of too much or too little abstraction". Which they are.

re: Bad Names

Adi — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:05:11 GMT

Try using GhostDoc, it will cause you to use better names.

re: Bad Names

Chris Nahr — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:13:33 GMT

I agree with Tom. A class name suffix (Ex or number) is really the best choice when you need to add some random helper methods to a base class you can't change -- so you make a derived class called ClassEx. If you mandate that such suffixes cannot be used you're just making work harder for everyone. Either these helper methods will then appear in totally unrelated classes (with similarly uninspired names like ...Utility), or they cannot be written at all if they need to refer to protected members, or people have to think up some silly arbitrary name just so they don't use Ex/2.

For the same reason, I disagree that Misc or Core/Worker are automatically bad. These are often in fact the best names for the best division of code, quaint as they might sound. Now Fake/Real and Special/Normal, that does sound bad!

re: Bad Names

Zac — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:38:33 GMT

These are very nice examples; see also http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BadVariableNames (like most c2 pages this is hoplessly disorganized, but some amusing examples nonetheless), and also all kinds of articles about how any comments in your code are another warning sign that the code needs cleanup.

re: Bad Names

Tom Kirby-Green — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:28:45 GMT

Actually the Framework Design Guidelines recommend using numeric epilogues to class names in preference to "Ex" - which lets face it you can only use once. Personally I'd rather see Foo, Foo2, Foo3 etc than have the developer struggle and fail to come up with a wholey unique name that doesn't reflect the classes nature. Just my 2p worth.

re: Bad Names

Raymond Chen - MSFT — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:28:27 GMT

"My" is a versatile particle. You can apply it to classes ("MyString") and functions/methods ("MyCopyFile"). All that you really know is that the class/function/method superficially resembles the non-"My" version, but differs in some subtle way that will be the source of a bug 2 months from now.

re: Bad Names

Jon Skeet — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 23:53:26 GMT

How about "NullableHelper_HACK"?

Jon