> I'm calling the high level sortDisplayedItems, (or sort_displayed_items) and there's a low level function that ACTUALLY sorts them (as opposed to handling the

> I'm calling the high level sortDisplayedItems, (or sort_displayed_items) and there's a low level function that ACTUALLY sorts them (as opposed to handling the other bits). You're absolutely right: naming things is hard. When I was writing Scheme long ago [in university], our convention was to name helper functions with `-helper` in the name: sort-foos sort-foos-helper sort-foos-merge-helper Now that I write mainly in Python, the convention seems to be to use underscores to indicate things that you should ignore. Usually that's done at a method level, where your consumers are calling the object's public API (sort), so the object's namespace helps reduce such name collisions. The addition of triple-quote docstrings for method comments helps a lot at clarifying purpose as well: class FooSorter(object): def sort(self, foos): """Sort an iterable of Foo objects""" # ... sanity-check inputs ... self._sort(foos) # do the sort operation def _sort(self, foos): """ Sort things we already know are Foo objects. This is a helper for sort(), which already sanity-checked our inputs. """ # do the actual sorting