Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Naming Convention Rant

If you're going to write APIs, then you ought to take care as to how you're doing your naming. Go back and read McConnell, Scott Meyers, or any other good author and see how they talk about having constistent naming styles across your public accessors. Consider then, a couple disconnects in the .NET Framework:
  • Form. Activated vs. Form.Deactivate (Tense disconnect)
  • Form.Load vs. Form.Closing (Tense disconnect)
  • Array.Length vs. ArrayList.Count (Noun disconnect)
These two jumped to mind, but I'm unhappily certain there are a passle more examples in the framework. Sure, Intellisense will help you with these kinds of problems, but the issue's more fundamental. Inconsistent naming does nothing but cause disruption to one's work. Folks who are more smarter than me won't have as much disruption, but again, consistency should be a fundamental issue during design phase. Sure, the framework's an immense set of libraries worked on by a huge number of folks. All the more reason to have consistent conventions! Make some serious effort up front to cut away crap like this and keep names consistent and clear. Rant off

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