# abnames: create new names from abbreviations.
software engineers need to create new terms all the time let it be for tools, services, packages, modules, etc. the name matters a lot: everybody will be referring to the new entity using the given name in forum comments, code variable names, filenames, etc.
suppose you are creating a "production logging service" in your company. will you call it production-logging-service? that's quite long and the presence of dashes creates problems when used in CamelCase languages such as go. and you can't use dashes in variable names in non-CamelCase languages either. there you would need to use production_logging_service. you can no longer search for production-logging-service to find all related usage, you would need to do a case insensitive search for "production.?logging.?service". that would then find both ProductionLoggingService and "Production Logging Service". and it takes long to type in too. it's a hassle. avoid multiword names.
another approach is to come up with a completely new, unrelated but cool sounding letter combinator such as "broxus". (i just made that up, any similarity to real entities is purely accidental.) this approach is dumb because the name is super hard to remember especially when you have a lot of such obnoxiously named services.
a third approach is to name them after some mythological entity that did something related. e.g. "herodotus was a greek historian that logged the ancient history" so let's name the service herodotus. it's a bit better but still silly. i have very bad memory for historical figures so such associations would be very hard for me to maintain especially when you have a dozen services named after ancient greek people.
a fourth, my preferred approach is that you take the reasonable sounding long explanatory name and create a short, easy-to-pronounce abbreviated name from it. so i'd name "Production LOGging Service" as "plogs". it must be easy to pronounce too. i have very good memory for this sort of naming. my mind can very quickly remember to break that name into "p-log-s". from there it can quickly associate to "production logging system" and boom, i know what service i'm reading about once i've seen the rule. and if it's unique enough then searching for documentation about the service will become a walk in the park.
there's one requirement for this: make sure these are documented. if you have a large project, then have a glossary that explains most of the commonly used abbreviations. and don't go overboard. only name big components like this, not every function.
even if you can't come up with a good name, a simple abbreviation is often better than using the full name or an unrelated name. that's how we got html, css, sql, png, gif etc and they ended up being quite usable in terms of searchability at least.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39299974 lists some nice examples for programming languages:
i keep doing this on this blog to keep all post urls short. even in this one: "abnames" means "abbreviated names". i write most of my posts to myself as a reference of my thoughts and opinions and i do revisit some posts regularly. it's super convenient to have a short, relatively easy to remember url to type.
published on 2024-03-23
new comment
see @/comments for the mechanics and ratelimits of commenting.