One of the seemingly simplest tasks in programming is sometimes one of the hardest: naming variables. One day, a coworker of mine was asked by numerous people throughout the day to help come up with meaningful variable and function names that applied to their specific situations. By the end of the day, she was mentally exhausted from the all of the thinking and internal deliberation involved.
This mental struggle seems to be present when naming any variable, function, class, property, enumeration, or namespace. It’s always difficult to come up with a name that
- Represents the data accurately
- Is verbose enough but still concise
- Makes sense to you
- Makes sense to any other team members that will come across your code in the future
It’s important that all of these criteria are met if you have any hopes of maintaining the software moving forward.
This struggle of my coworker that day inspired me to write a song about the whole process of naming variables while writing code. The song portrays a developer (myself) trying and trying to write code, but I need help naming variables. With none of my coworkers able to help and getting caught up in meetings, it seems like I can never make any progress! It’s just one of those days…
You can find the song below:
This song rocks!