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Engineering's Naming Conventions: A Masterclass in Simplicity
CodeQuality Post #3727 · source on Telegram

Engineering's Naming Conventions: A Masterclass in Simplicity

Description

The meme is a screenshot of a tweet from user Matt Rickard, which sarcastically states, 'Naming is the easiest thing in engineering.' Below this tweet is a screenshot from a Wikipedia article titled 'Frequency bands.' The article displays a table listing the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) designations for radio spectrum frequencies. The humor lies in the naming convention shown in the table, which perfectly illustrates why naming is, in fact, one of the hardest problems. The names demonstrate a simplistic and repetitive pattern, escalating with modifiers like 'Extremely low,' 'Super low,' 'Ultra low,' 'Very low,' and then repeating the same pattern for 'high' frequencies, culminating in 'Tremendously high frequency.' For senior engineers, this is a painfully relatable example of how seemingly simple naming tasks can result in confusing and uninspired taxonomies, a problem that plagues everything from variable names to microservice architectures

Categories

CodeQuality DevCommunities Communication DesignPatterns Architecture Networking

Common Tags

NamingThings NamingConventions CodingHumor DeveloperHumor TechHumor RelatableDevExperience

Comments

26
Anonymous ★ Top Pick Our stack has `billing_service`, `new_billing_service`, and `nextgen_billing_service`. The first one is the only one that actually handles billing
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    Our stack has `billing_service`, `new_billing_service`, and `nextgen_billing_service`. The first one is the only one that actually handles billing

  2. Anonymous

    The ITU’s spectrum table looks like the enum you get after seven rounds of code review: Low, VeryLow, UltraLow, SuperLow, TremendouslyLow - still tidier than our ServiceManagerHandlerFactoryFactory

  3. Anonymous

    After 20 years in tech, I've learned there are only two hard problems: cache invalidation, naming things, and apparently finding new adjectives beyond 'tremendously' when you've already used 'extremely', 'super', 'ultra', and 'very' twice in your frequency band taxonomy

  4. Anonymous

    Ah yes, naming things - one of the two hard problems in computer science, along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. This radio frequency spectrum table perfectly captures why: when your 'standard' naming convention requires distinguishing between 'tremendously,' 'extremely,' 'super,' 'ultra,' and 'very' as technical descriptors, you know someone on the ITU standards committee was having a tremendously difficult time. It's like semantic versioning, but for adjectives - and just as consistently applied. At least in software we only have to debate camelCase vs snake_case; RF engineers have to explain why 'tremendously low' is lower than 'extremely low' with a straight face

  5. Anonymous

    Naming done right: stacking adjectives like unchecked tech debt until 'frequency' begs for an acronym

  6. Anonymous

    Adjective escalation as a naming scheme - VHF/UHF/EHF/THF - is basically the original enum inflation; we just call it FooService, FooServiceV2, and FooServiceV2_UltraFinal

  7. Anonymous

    RF bands are what happens when a standards body bikesheds an ordinal: Low → Very → Ultra → Super… now write the ORDER BY and tell me where “Tremendously” lands without breaking prod

  8. @artur_odesa 4y

    Ludicrous

  9. @QutePoet 4y

    Great naming policy through.

  10. @azizhakberdiev 4y

    There would be enumerable instead if it would be made by tech. Below 3 Hz - 0 3-30 Hz - 1 ...

  11. @azizhakberdiev 4y

    If it would be made by mathematicians, there would be no ranges, they require exact numbers

    1. @thematdev 4y

      Strange statement

      1. @azizhakberdiev 4y

        Sorry, not native English speaker (writer?)

        1. @RiedleroD 4y

          "native speaker" works

    2. @RiedleroD 4y

      doubt

      1. @thematdev 4y

        y

        1. @RiedleroD 4y

          because that's just not how it works. Those are ranges for use in communication. I'm sure mathematicians have something like this too.

          1. @azizhakberdiev 4y

            They use powers of 10

            1. @thematdev 4y

              Who "they"?

              1. @azizhakberdiev 4y

                Mathematicians. I mean without those acronyms

            2. @RiedleroD 4y

              sometimes they do, sometimes they use scientific notation, sometimes they just talk about ranges, e.g. blah blah the value is in the 7th magnitude

              1. @RiedleroD 4y

                (bad translation from what I know from german though)

              2. @thematdev 4y

                I think pure mathematician will unlikely deal with frequency ranges like that

  12. @azizhakberdiev 4y

    All I know exactly is that mathematicians would prefer as short expression as possible

  13. @Magilarp 4y

    Bonkersly low frequency

  14. @BoxCollider2D 2y

    Why don't you call it frequency?

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