Function names Memes

The classic programmer journey from self-righteousness to self-sabotage in three easy steps: First, you write a verbose, descriptive function name that perfectly documents what it does. You feel virtuous. Clean code! Self-documenting! Then, you realize typing that monstrosity repeatedly is killing your productivity. So you create a wrapper function with a shorter name. Problem solved! Finally, you're faced with your creation in production code: if (cumming()) - and suddenly you remember why code reviews exist. Your future maintainers will either die laughing or hunt you down with pitchforks. And this, friends, is why naming things remains one of the two hardest problems in computer science.

Someone said to make function names self-explanatory, and buddy took it literally . The irony is palpable as they create a function called "selfExplanatory" with increasingly chaotic casing and naming conventions, then ask "Am I doing it right?" Meanwhile, the only response is just an opening parenthesis - the universal symbol for "I've given up trying to explain this to you." Nothing says "I understand coding best practices" like completely missing the point while technically following instructions.

When naming variables, cultural context matters more than you think. Some poor French programmer just trying to be descriptive with his data analysis functions - Anal_in , Anal_out , anal_insertion , and the masterpiece Anal_compare - accidentally created the most uncomfortable code review in CS history. Ten years of coding experience and I still can't bring myself to abbreviate "Analysis" in my variable names. Not after The Incident™ of 2011 when our offshore team's perfectly innocent code made the entire San Francisco office spit out their kombucha simultaneously.