what’s in a name?

In my experience pretty much everything is in the name when it comes to the art of programming. If you start out with bad naming and a structure which does not communicate any of your intentions with writing the code you will end up having problems. Either understanding it yourself or having anyone else make sense of your code.

When I do code reviews I often only get to this part. If I can not understand the purpose of the code it is hard to do a review which does anything but see if you follow coding conventions and don’t do anything utterly stupid. Bad names and a misleading folder/package/namespace structure makes it hard for anyone to judge what you’re trying to accomplish.