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Discussion on: Do you have a process for naming things?

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Casey Brooks

Variable names don't matter much to me. Variables are ephemeral (unless they're global variables, which make me sad), so the names don't go very far in the codebase.

I find consistency in naming to be rather important. Things that follow a consistent naming convention make it easier to understand disparate parts of the codebase because there are similar patterns in names.

As @gypsydave5 notes, once a name is in place it tends to stick, but bad naming only gets worse if you try to fix bad names half-way through the codebase. A bad naming convention that is followed throughout the codebase still gives valuable information, because it relates other parts of the code. A good name that doesn't follow the convention makes everything harder to understand, which actually makes it a really bad name.