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Comment by Xurinos | Hacker News Reader

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

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"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.

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