TITLE: A Good Name Is About An Idea, Not An Implementation
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 06, 2012 3:34 PM
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In
The Poetry of Function Naming,
Stephen Wolfram captures something that all programmers eventually
learn:
[Naming functions is] an unforgiving and humbling activity. And the
issue is almost always the same. The reason you can't find a good
name is because you don't really understand with complete and
ultimate clarity what the function does.
Sometimes we can't come up with the perfect name for a function or
a variable until after we have written code that uses it. The act
of writing the program helps us to learn about the program's
content.
Later in the same blog entry, Wolfram says something that made me
think of my previous blog, on how
some questions presuppose how they are to be answered:
But in a computer language, each function name ultimately refers
to a particular piece of functionality that is defined in an
absolute way, and can be implemented by a specific precise program.
When we write OO programs, a name doesn't always refer to a specific
function. With polymorphic variables, we don't usually know which
method will be executed when we use a name. Any object that provides
the protocol required by the variable's type, or implements the
interface so named, may be stored in the variable. It may even be
an instance of a class I know nothing about.
For this reason, when I teach OO programming, I am careful to talk
about sending a message rather than "invoking a method" or
"calling a function". The receiver of the message interprets the
message, not the sender.
This doesn't invalidate what Wolfram says, though it does point to
a way in which we might rephrase it more generally. The name of a
good method isn't about specific functionality so much as about
expectation. It's about the core idea associated with an
interaction, not any particular implementation of that idea.
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