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> think a thousand times before you name something

I gave up .... I write mostly in languages that allow you to deterministically rename things with refactoring tools, so I frequently rename important classes 5 or 6 times before I'm done.




Completely agree. I find that the right name takes ages to come about. Worse, it may require a lot of architectural refactoring that, many times, has nothing to do with the one entity you are trying to name. Instead, it is connected with the entire workflow you are designing. Nothing worse than spending ages coming up with the right name for a class, only to find out the entire class is not needed and you got the workflow all wrong :-) which I have done many a time, to be fair


This.

Not only renaming, but re-bundling entities, moving layers, changing abstractions – refactoring is crucial during and immediately after development. As you implement your idea, you will inevitably find a better way to express it, and it's crucial to be able to re-do these things as many times as possible to reach the best possible result (if it's not a throwaway prototype, of course): no maintainer, including yourself a month later, will have a picture as full and clear as you right after finishing the first iteration.


I've been around long enough to remember a time before refactor->rename was a thing. Now naming can evolve as the class/variable evolves so there's so much less initial cognitive overhead worrying about a name than there once was.




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