Comments on: The 7 Worst Verbs Programmers Use In Function Calls

By: Aperage

Aperage — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:09:56 +0000

hey,
nice feedback for beginner…
to be honest, having english as a secondary language, I do use these terms quite a bit while coding. It’s meaningful to me but reading this post, I understand it’s kind of wrong.

But could you try, on the contrary, to supply a list of meaningfull function name.
Mainly like verb examples to enrich people vocabulary and thus improving the code written everywhere

thank and good luck

By: Kimo

Kimo — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 02:56:56 +0000

Loved the article. Gave me something to think about. It takes a lot of work for me to come up with method names so I just call all methods DaKine. As in DaKine01() does does some dispatching, Dakine02() does some populating, DaKine03() does some handling, etc. Saves me a lot of time thinking up new names.

By: Nathan Schubkegel

Nathan Schubkegel — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 23:21:07 +0000

While trolling some of my old code, I found a function name that successfully conveyed to me that it may or may not perform an action. It was named UnhighlightAndEndAnyClickAndDrag(). I can’t wait to slip “Any” in front of the noun part of more of my function names!

By: Nathan Schubkegel

Nathan Schubkegel — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 01:10:22 +0000

How many people hate the “Check” verb? Often I run into trouble finding a name for a new method that *maybe* does something. I consider using a name like CheckForStateChanges(), but it doesn’t say what the function actually does if it encounters a state change! (My name is purposely generic – real world names would read like CheckForChangedFiles(), CheckInboxForNewMail(), or even terser like CheckValues(), CheckScreenWidth(), etc… and just go home if the context is such that Checkboxes might be involved…)

One solution would be to put two verbs in the function name. However, this leads me to make methods with unapprovable long names like CheckForUpdatesAndDownloadAndInstall() or CheckValuesAndComplainAboutErrors(). For some reason people hate reading more than 1 verb, 1 noun, and 1 adjective in a single method call. Conjunctions and articles are snubbed too, so these examples were doomed from the start.

Sometimes I give in, and I steal “good” verbs that have their own valid uses, and I cripple my function names with them. GetNewMail() – it looks like a getter that returns some private instance data, but it actually goes out on the internet and might not return for 15 seconds! CreateErrorReport() – it looks like it’s going to make an error report, but nobody told you it was going to show it AND dispose it when finished! SaveDocumentChanges() – it looks like it’s going to pillage your hard drive by overwriting the whole file every time it’s called! Names that abuse standard-verbs are misleading and I hate them more than full-looking-but-actually-empty candy wrappers on public sidewalks.

In practice I use Juuso’s lame verbs with enough extra words to accomplish two goals. I provide a name that is memorable – my readers should only need to learn my code once. Then, in that name I give readers a feel for what the function does, but only enough so that they’ll go look at the implementation for confirmation. You can probably imagine what ProcessChangedScreenSize() or PerformErrorChecking() does… but you should really go look to make sure.

I’d love to hear if anyone developing software at a corporation with peer-reviewed code gets away with names that use “Check” or multi-verbs or hijacked-established verbs. I’d also love to hear about more possible ways to name complicated functions.

By: Chase Saunders

Chase Saunders — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 02:57:04 +0000

doProperThing()

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 06:27:15 +0000

I agree with everything except ‘handle’. Events need to be handles. A common action in search programs is creating the SQL clauses for certain aspects of the search. Those aspects are ‘handled’ by their own blocks of code.

By: Chris O'Sullivan

Chris O'Sullivan — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:35:52 +0000

What about: process

I (ashamedly) use it all the time when I want to do ‘something’ that is ill defined.

By: Eirik Hoem

Eirik Hoem — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:45:22 +0000

This article would make much more sense if you renamed it to “The 7 Worst Verbs Programmers Use As Function Call Names”. Most of the verbs you describe here works very well IN a function name as long as the rest of the name is describing. On their own they are pretty much useless as you point out :)

By: Rui Ferreira

Rui Ferreira — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 01:12:45 +0000

I don’t agree with most your

# dispatch
I guess that’s one of those words that comes from patterns language. It’s not very descriptive but everyone knows what you’re talking about when you say “dispatched that request to a thread”.

# resolve
Resolve domain to ip addr. translate. etc.

# handle
Usually used to “handle” events. Handler for double-click, interrupt and so on

# populate
It’s used quite a lot, especially in tests. It means exactly that, populate with content….

By: Justin Carmony

Justin Carmony — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:55:23 +0000

Amen! Great article!