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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

These are all great tips but still won't help me figuring out how should I name my variable. Sometimes it's obvious but sometimes I struggle. I hope it isn't an indicator of bad code :)

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In my experience if you're struggling with naming something (variable, function, class, etc.) in your code, it often indicates that you're not entirely sure about the role of that particular structure. When this happens to me, I ask myself: what is the role of this variable? What does this method do? If you can't figure that out sometimes that's indicating that it's time for refactoring.

Get the book "Code complete", it has a large section dedicated to this problem.

obligatory:

    There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache     
    invalidation and naming things.
    -- Phil Karlton

I like this version: "There are two hard things in CS: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."

My students often miss 0 element of arrays.

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