Perhaps it is not news to everyone that there are two hard things in Computer Science.

I previously explained why I felt programming is not boring because there is some art in doing it. I will not spend any time here arguing whether naming things is an art or not.

Instead, I will just go straight into how to name things properly. All the examples below uses the Julia language even though the same principles can be applied to other languages.

Why?

To me, it is extremely important to write code that is readable and easy to understand. If I write it properly, my colleagues will be able to read it, support it, and enhance it going forward. If I write it badly, I may even curse at myself in the future.

I will not cover naming conventions such as

CamelCase or snake_case, as they are fairly well documented and understood. Rather, I will focus more about the semantics.

As our journey begins…

What are the things that we need to give names to? In Julia, the main things are modules, data types, functions, constants and variables. The very first decision is to choose between using a verb, a noun, or an adjective.

#visual studio code