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The problem is when someone is trying to browse the code. When things are well named, then it is much easier for someone unfamiliar with the code base to find t
by gizmo686 14y ago
The problem is when someone is trying to browse the code. When things are well named, then it is much easier for someone unfamiliar with the code base to find their way around. I've done a fair amount of hacking around in open source projects. There are some projects where I can download the source code, know what I want to do going into it, and just do it. In other projects, when I am at a place I think is relevant to what I want to do, I have to dive deep into the programs abstraction layers just to see how certain objects and functions behave and what they do. Some of that is likely an unavoidable result of me needing to get to a rather core part of the code, but it seems like a lot of it has to do with the clarity of naming.
If I need to know the precise behavior, I will generally look it up anyway, but I do not need to know the precise behavior of everything.