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I know of no automated tools available today that can determine if an identifier is accurately and usefully named. They can all tell if you are using the proper

I know of no automated tools available today that can determine if an identifier is accurately and usefully named. They can all tell if you are using the proper case, but that doesn't really tell you anything. No tool like that tells you if returning a bool instead of an enum is appropriate here, or that a reference vs a pointer makes more sense given the rest of the code. I'm sure a clever machine learning algorithm could figure that out with a corpus as large as Google's. Maybe. But no tool like that works today. And not strangely at all, Google does accept "what clang-tidy does" as the canonical way of formatting text. But readability at Google is far more than just formatting. Readability is frustrating and annoying, but more than just lint.

dlubarov 5y ago
> I know of no automated tools available today that can determine if an identifier is accurately and usefully named. Naming isn't very language-specific though [*], and poor naming should be flagged in coding interviews. Any Google engineer should generally have good naming, and should be able to critique others' naming in any language. [*] Granted there are some language-specific naming conventions, like ! and ? in Ruby methods. But I'd say the majority of languages don't have important naming conventions, and those that do often have lints for them.
- vkou 5y ago
  > Naming isn't very language-specific though [*], and poor naming should be flagged in coding interviews. I'm not going to turn a candidate away because they use shorthand names when writing code under time pressure on a whiteboard.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    This discussion wasn't about hiring but about code reviews. If you use bad names in your code then the reviewer is correct when they tell you to make better names.
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  "poor naming should be flagged in coding interviews" Exactly! And Readability process is exactly the training Google uses to ensure someone knows how to look for this issue, and that someone actually is looking for this issue in code reviews. There is plenty about the Readability process I don't like (particularly that one has to get it through a fairly artificial process), but checking for things like the above (which I just use as one easily understood example) isn't something that happens automatically in an organization as large as Google, with as many engineers as Google. A common story on HackerNews is just how bad the average programmer is, how crummy code they produce. Taking steps to ensure they do it better is a good thing. We can argue about the process, for sure, and there are many things I would love to change about it. But "yeah, that should be done in code reviews" is exactly the idea here.

dlubarov 5y ago

> I know of no automated tools available today that can determine if an identifier is accurately and usefully named. Naming isn't very language-specific though [*], and poor naming should be flagged in coding interviews. Any Google engineer should generally have good naming, and should be able to critique others' naming in any language. [*] Granted there are some language-specific naming conventions, like ! and ? in Ruby methods. But I'd say the majority of languages don't have important naming conventions, and those that do often have lints for them.

vkou 5y ago
> Naming isn't very language-specific though [*], and poor naming should be flagged in coding interviews. I'm not going to turn a candidate away because they use shorthand names when writing code under time pressure on a whiteboard.
- Jensson 5y ago
  This discussion wasn't about hiring but about code reviews. If you use bad names in your code then the reviewer is correct when they tell you to make better names.
compiler-guy 5y ago
"poor naming should be flagged in coding interviews" Exactly! And Readability process is exactly the training Google uses to ensure someone knows how to look for this issue, and that someone actually is looking for this issue in code reviews. There is plenty about the Readability process I don't like (particularly that one has to get it through a fairly artificial process), but checking for things like the above (which I just use as one easily understood example) isn't something that happens automatically in an organization as large as Google, with as many engineers as Google. A common story on HackerNews is just how bad the average programmer is, how crummy code they produce. Taking steps to ensure they do it better is a good thing. We can argue about the process, for sure, and there are many things I would love to change about it. But "yeah, that should be done in code reviews" is exactly the idea here.