Naming things

Naming things is hard.

"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." – Leon Bambrick[1][2]

General advice

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Avoid ambiguity
Make it easy to pronounce, to type, and to remember
Consider the translations
  • If it is a user-facing feature, this is extra important.
  • Is the name almost-untranslatable in many languages? (e.g., BetaFeatures (cf. T58537))
  • Is the name going to be extra-long in any language? (e.g., help, randompage, [better examples?])
  • Metaphors, idioms, and pop-culture references may have no meaning or different meanings in other languages or cultures.
Abbreviations
  • For unavoidably long names, specify the short form.
  • People tend to shorten anything they can, especially if they write it regularly, as help-desk people and developers tend to do.
  • Contractions/Initialisms/Acronyms will be invented, if you don't plan for it. (e.g., visual editor is "VE" to many people)
Stick with a single name
Check it isn't a reserved keyword in the usual programming languages

See also

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Further reading

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Wikipedia articles
Humour
Other

References

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