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Does anyone know of a good site for these kind of questions other than the English stack exchange. I frequently run into programming related naming issues (who

by janee 6y ago

Does anyone know of a good site for these kind of questions other than the English stack exchange. I frequently run into programming related naming issues (who doesn't eh?). But I struggle to find accurate search terms to help answer them...and the results are usually downed out by non-technical related language Q&A's E.g. I was trying to name a table yesterday that would store events related to boxes, pallets, containers and vessels and was looking for a generic name to group them, e.g. goods_events, entity_events, object_events, domain_object_events etc. but I had no idea how to phrase my question and not get a bunch of junk back Would be awesome if you could tweak some suggestion algo to be trained on repo's specific to your domain and have it spit out suggestions based on human language questions, e.g. gpt3 but focussed on some domain.

andy_ppp 6y ago
Yes naming things is difficult and we would all benefit from shared names for the same things.
lioeters 6y ago
> boxes, pallets, containers and vessels Woo, that's a tough one. Even as a native speaker, I'd be hard-pressed to find one word in English that describes all these similar but different terms. I looked up some of these in a dictionary for definitions and synonyms. OK, the word "holder" seems to be the most general term that includes all these types of objects. So I'd name it "holder_events_table", with a column "holder_type" being box, pallet, etc. This issue of finding precise naming is related to "ontologies", how to establish an organization of agreed-upon terms to classify objects in the world. I agree with you, it would be valuable if there was a community-developed reference where we could search for the most appropriate names of things.
- janee 6y ago
  yeah I ended up leaning towards something similar, but avoided the whole issue of naming the "thing" by instead naming it based on the class of events contained in the table...ended up calling it tracking_events, and making it reference the "thing" as trackable_type,trackable_id (ala polymorphic relation in Rails world). but yeah, naming things...wonder how much time I've spent pondering over names in my career (probably too much haha)
afarrell 6y ago
If you aren't leaning on the English Language at large, then you should ask the community of people who will use your software. Who are your stakeholders? If you don't have a relationship with your stakeholders because your company has paid lots of money to become Agile[1][2], then you are indeed in trouble. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M [2] https://www.fgcquaker.org/resources/form-without-substance https://www.fgcquaker.org/resources/form-without-substance
imhoguy 6y ago
> boxes, pallets, containers and vessels So you keep info about these separately already or in some common table with discriminator? Then maybe: boxes -> box_events, containers -> container_events,... Or: units(type:{box, container,...}) -> unit_events
fastball 6y ago
I use Power Thesaurus[1], which is crowd-sourced and frequently has words that are well suited to technical use-cases. In your case, I looked at synonyms for "containers" and found some likely candidates such as "holders" or "receptacles", so `receptacle_events`. [1] https://powerthesaurus.com/ https://powerthesaurus.com/
- scrollaway 6y ago
  Woah, this looks like an incredible site.
- silviogutierrez 6y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation!
twic 6y ago
Vessels like drums or like ships?
browserface 6y ago
cargo events? freight events? shipment events? transport events? manifest events? payload events? package events?
BurningFrog 6y ago
> events related to boxes, pallets, containers and vessels Think about why these 4 things are of interest. What aspect of them is it you're working with? If that aspect has a name, that might be the basis if a good name that reflects the purpose of your code.
dcolkitt 6y ago
Not quite what you're asking, but I keep a list of useful words when I get stuck trying to come up with a variable name: https://github.com/Mister-Meeseeks/words-for-variables https://github.com/Mister-Meeseeks/words-for-variables (Pull requests are welcome, if anyone else has good suggestions for candidates on the list.)
dcolkitt 6y ago
> Does anyone know of a good site for these kind of questions other than the English stack exchange. Well, I was inspired enough by this idea to create a sub-reddit for the discussion of specific variable naming challenges. Hopefully it catches on. https://www.reddit.com/r/namemyvariable/ https://www.reddit.com/r/namemyvariable/
- janee 6y ago
  Haha awesome! Sounds like something you could print on a tshirt r/namemyvariable Hmm feels a bit weird, maybe r/namingvariables haha already think'n bout re-naming the naming sub lolz
JdeBP 6y ago
It is the English Language and Usage Stack Exchange (for linguists and etymologists), as distinct from the English Language Learners Stack Exchange (for people learning English), and indeed from the Computer Science Stack Exchange (for computer scientists) and the Software Engineering Stack Exchange (for software engineers). * https://cs.stackexchange.com/ https://cs.stackexchange.com/ * https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ So the question to ask onesself is whether one wants answers to a programming language question on how to name a variable from an audience of linguists or from an audience of software engineers. (-:

by janee 6y ago

andy_ppp 6y ago

Yes naming things is difficult and we would all benefit from shared names for the same things.

lioeters 6y ago

> boxes, pallets, containers and vessels Woo, that's a tough one. Even as a native speaker, I'd be hard-pressed to find one word in English that describes all these similar but different terms. I looked up some of these in a dictionary for definitions and synonyms. OK, the word "holder" seems to be the most general term that includes all these types of objects. So I'd name it "holder_events_table", with a column "holder_type" being box, pallet, etc. This issue of finding precise naming is related to "ontologies", how to establish an organization of agreed-upon terms to classify objects in the world. I agree with you, it would be valuable if there was a community-developed reference where we could search for the most appropriate names of things.

janee 6y ago
yeah I ended up leaning towards something similar, but avoided the whole issue of naming the "thing" by instead naming it based on the class of events contained in the table...ended up calling it tracking_events, and making it reference the "thing" as trackable_type,trackable_id (ala polymorphic relation in Rails world). but yeah, naming things...wonder how much time I've spent pondering over names in my career (probably too much haha)

afarrell 6y ago

If you aren't leaning on the English Language at large, then you should ask the community of people who will use your software. Who are your stakeholders? If you don't have a relationship with your stakeholders because your company has paid lots of money to become Agile[1][2], then you are indeed in trouble. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M [2] https://www.fgcquaker.org/resources/form-without-substance https://www.fgcquaker.org/resources/form-without-substance

imhoguy 6y ago

> boxes, pallets, containers and vessels So you keep info about these separately already or in some common table with discriminator? Then maybe: boxes -> box_events, containers -> container_events,... Or: units(type:{box, container,...}) -> unit_events

fastball 6y ago

I use Power Thesaurus[1], which is crowd-sourced and frequently has words that are well suited to technical use-cases. In your case, I looked at synonyms for "containers" and found some likely candidates such as "holders" or "receptacles", so `receptacle_events`. [1] https://powerthesaurus.com/ https://powerthesaurus.com/

scrollaway 6y ago
Woah, this looks like an incredible site.
silviogutierrez 6y ago
Thanks for the recommendation!

twic 6y ago

Vessels like drums or like ships?

browserface 6y ago

cargo events? freight events? shipment events? transport events? manifest events? payload events? package events?

BurningFrog 6y ago

> events related to boxes, pallets, containers and vessels Think about why these 4 things are of interest. What aspect of them is it you're working with? If that aspect has a name, that might be the basis if a good name that reflects the purpose of your code.

dcolkitt 6y ago

Not quite what you're asking, but I keep a list of useful words when I get stuck trying to come up with a variable name: https://github.com/Mister-Meeseeks/words-for-variables https://github.com/Mister-Meeseeks/words-for-variables (Pull requests are welcome, if anyone else has good suggestions for candidates on the list.)

dcolkitt 6y ago

> Does anyone know of a good site for these kind of questions other than the English stack exchange. Well, I was inspired enough by this idea to create a sub-reddit for the discussion of specific variable naming challenges. Hopefully it catches on. https://www.reddit.com/r/namemyvariable/ https://www.reddit.com/r/namemyvariable/

janee 6y ago
Haha awesome! Sounds like something you could print on a tshirt r/namemyvariable Hmm feels a bit weird, maybe r/namingvariables haha already think'n bout re-naming the naming sub lolz

JdeBP 6y ago

It is the English Language and Usage Stack Exchange (for linguists and etymologists), as distinct from the English Language Learners Stack Exchange (for people learning English), and indeed from the Computer Science Stack Exchange (for computer scientists) and the Software Engineering Stack Exchange (for software engineers). * https://cs.stackexchange.com/ https://cs.stackexchange.com/ * https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ So the question to ask onesself is whether one wants answers to a programming language question on how to name a variable from an audience of linguists or from an audience of software engineers. (-: