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> No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. You just provided your own counterargument. People naturally aren't determined or organized, that

• discreteevent 4y ago
  > You can't change human nature, you can only work around it Yes you can. When a person becomes a civil engineer they are trained to change their nature so that when they design a bridge they do it in a way that meets all the standards with full documentation rather than the way they would sloppily design their dogshed at home.
  • MrGilbert 4y ago
    But isn't that exactly the "work around it" part? There are full standards one needs to adhere to, so you basically work around the sloppy part of human nature.
    • DoughnutHole 4y ago
      Exactly - engineers don't change their nature, they're legally mandated to follow very strict rules regarding best practices. They work in heavily constrained systems with checks and balances to prevent slip-ups. If they don't follow the rules and something goes wrong they're legally liable. Strip away the systems that coerce engineers into complying with best practices and you'll very quickly see how little their "nature" has changed from the average person's. This "cute names" pattern is simply a system to prevent some possible bad outcomes of developers free-styling. Whether it's worth the tradeoffs is debatable, but feeble systems like this are all we've got unless we establish regulatory bodies like those in "real" engineering. The millions of programmers in the world aren't going to all magically develop discipline - software engineering necessarily requires building your systems with that lack of discipline in mind.
      • bumby 4y ago
        Software development seems much more opposed to standardization than traditional engineering disciplines. I don't know if it's an artifact of software development itself (e.g., things are just so easy to change by comparison that it becomes hard to set a standard because things move so fast) or if its an artifact of software being a much newer discipline than others. E.g., when you look at mechanical designs from the early industrial age, it becomes pretty clear there were no standards then either.
• threatofrain 4y ago
  Really not sure this works for homebrew with their brew and tap and keg naming theme.
• bumby 4y ago
  >You can't change human nature, you can only work around it You can create systems that provide the guardrails and incentives to modify human behavior though. The root of much of this discussion is communication, which is a near-ubiquitous problem in relatively large organizations. Communication, in this instance, is that people want to have a clue about what something does. The authors point is that as code changes, the names may no longer communicate what that code does. Unfortunately, their suggestion to make cutesy names does nothing to fix the communication issue. We're still left with poor communication about what the thing does. It's a veiled attempted to pretend like they're solving the problem of communication, but it's just a disguise that leaves the same problem at the end of the day. At least with descriptive names, I can have some clue as to what the code used to do, and maybe glean from that why it is the way it is now.