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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

re: naming things.

Please have objects be nouns and methods be verbs. Please done have a class named "buildLetter" or "generateEmail" - it's confusing to read.

At least to me.

Perhaps I'm alone in that? I run in to enough "objects named as verbs" I'm sort of beginning to wonder if I'm alone in this thinking.

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Only thing I am on the fence about is "methods be verbs", unless your language differentiates between methods and properties. The exception in my mind was the classic Point.x, where x is a method for accessing the value of an internal x.

Note that some languages, such as perl, understand whether you are setting or getting by the surrounding syntax:

   my $x = $point->x;   # get the value of x
   $point->x(100);      # set the value of x

"point" can be a verb too. :-)

Just today I renamed a method someone named "showButton" because I thought

  result = showButton()

was a call that showed the button and returned a boolean result. In reality it just returned a boolean based on if it was configured to show a button. The new name: "shouldShowButton"

But then I got to thinking… well… maybe I'm suggesting that the button should be shown…

There's something to be said for context.

[Redacted] Misread your post.

I usually write out a bunch of names without thinking to hard about them and then try to read them. In this instance, given that you've already had showButton and shouldShowButton i'd probably look at:

  result = buttonShown()
  result = buttonVisible()
  result = buttonIsVisible()
  result = visibleButton()
  result = !buttonHidden()

To a lot of programmers this would seem like a waste of time, but I'm with the article's author (and, I'd hope, other HN readers) in that it's time well spent.

What would confuse me about generateEmail is that on the surface without even looking at the code I would wonder if it built the e-mail body itself or sent out an e-mail or both.

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