Why giving meaningful names to things in programming is important

Everything in this world has meaningful names. It helps our brain to understand and remember the things very easily. It means less mental mapping.

Let us take real-world examples of meaningful names given to things like hand wash (of course, you don’t use it to wash your face), face wash, shaving cream, aftershave and so on.

Similarly, in the programming, everything needs to have a meaningful name because we as a developer spend our most of the time reading the code than we do writing it.

As a developer, our daily job is to give a solution to the problem at hand.

To solve the problem at hand, we sometimes create a project, an assembly, a namespace,  directories, class files, classes, fields, methods, other members, UI elements, their translation files, translation keys and so on.

All of these things should have the meaningful name so that they convey their intent and you realize what they are doing by just looking at their name.

Perhaps they answer all the big questions that you or future maintenance developers would have.

Let’s go through the following code snippet. It is written in js.

  downld(recs){ 
        const cols = ['Name', 'Age', 'Gender'];
        let d = `data:text/csv;charset=utf-8,${cols.join(',')}rn`;
        recs.each((r) => {
            const row = [
                r.get('name'),
                r.get('age'),
                r.get('gender')
            ].join(",");

            d += `${row}rn`;
        });
        const u = encodeURI(d);
        const lnk = document.createElement("a");
        lnk.setAttribute("href", u);
        lnk.setAttribute("download", "users.csv");
        document.body.appendChild(lnk);
        lnk.click();
  }

I hope you understood what it is doing.

The above example shows that a simple code snippet could be difficult to understand when meaningful names are NOT given to variables, functions and so on.

Now think about a project that has 100+ classes and thousands of lines.

Don’t you think it will be painful for the maintenance developer as well as an original developer to read it again in the future?

This could have been easy to understand when good names would have been given.

Let us try to give the meaningful name in the code snippet.

  downloadAsCsv(users){ 
        const columnNames = ['Name', 'Age', 'Gender'];
        const csvHeader = `data:text/csv;charset=utf-8,${columnNames.join(',')}rn`;
        let csvDataRows = "";
        const newlineAndCarriageReturn = `rn`;
        users.each((user) => {
            const currentRow = [
                user.get('name'),
                user.get('age'),
                user.get('gender')
            ].join(",");

            csvDataRows += currentRow + newlineAndCarriageReturn;
        });

        const csvFileContent = csvHeader + csvDataRows;
        const encodedUri = encodeURI(csvFileContent);
        const newlink = document.createElement("a");
        newlink.setAttribute("href", encodedUri);
        newlink.setAttribute("download", "users.csv");
        document.body.appendChild(newlink);
        newlink.click();
  }

Now, do you think it’s a little better than the previous version?

The good names encourage you to write clean and good code. You can go one step ahead and split above function.

    downloadAsCsv(users){
        const csvFileContent = this.generateCsvContent(users);
        const encodedUri = encodeURI(csvFileContent);
        const newlink = document.createElement("a");
        newlink.setAttribute("href", encodedUri);
        newlink.setAttribute("download", "users.csv");
        document.body.appendChild(newlink);
        newlink.click();
    }

    generateCsvContent(users) {
        const columnNames = ['Name', 'Age', 'Gender'];
        const csvHeader = `data:text/csv;charset=utf-8,${columnNames.join(',')}rn`;
        let csvDataRows = "";
        const newlineAndCarriageReturn = `rn`;
        users.each((user) => {
            const currentRow = [
                user.get('name'),
                user.get('age'),
                user.get('gender')
            ].join(",");

            csvDataRows += currentRow + newlineAndCarriageReturn;
        });

        return csvHeader + csvDataRows;
    }

I hope you agree with me that meaningful names will make everyone (including you) more than happy after reading it.

In case of methods, when you failed to give a name to a method, you may realize it’s doing more than one thing. It is really helping you.

Even when you are able to give a meaningful name to a method, you may realize that the method doesn’t belong to this class.

I often realized that this practice of giving meaningful names helped me a lot about understanding the solutions, separations of concerns and even responsibility of the classes, methods, assembiles and so on.

Suppose your boss comes to you and asks you to fix value against gender column in generated CSV (from above example) on priority. Instead of debugging and finding the location of the code, just ask IDE to show you “generateCsvContent” routine.

Thus, help your IDE to help you by giving meaningful names to everything in programming so that you can figure out everything very easily.

Consequently, giving meaningful names will help you in some way or other.

When you revisit your code after 4 hours or 4 weeks, or 4 years, and you think you could give more meaningful names now then

DO NOT hesitate to rename it if it’s not breaking anything and has less impact on other features.

REMEMBER!

https://blog.beingcraftsman.com/datta/