Final Words

The hardest thing about choosing good names is that it requires good descriptive skills and a shared cultural background. This is a teaching issue rather than a technical, business, or management issue. As a result many people in this field don’t learn to do it very well.

People are also afraid of renaming things for fear that some other developers will object. We do not share that fear and find that we are actually grateful when names change (for the better). Most of the time we don’t really memorize the names of classes and methods. We use the modern tools to deal with details like that so we can focus on whether the code reads like paragraphs and sentences, or at least like tables and data structure (a sentence isn’t always the best way to display data). You will probably end up surprising someone when you rename, just like you might with any other code improvement. Don’t let it stop you in your tracks.