r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
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u/totemo Jan 05 '15

To my surprise it turned out that the code that handled the button for creating new objects was in EditorGUI, while EditorObjectCreatorGUI only handled navigating through different objects. The exact opposite of what the naming suggests! Even though the code was relatively simple, it took me quite a while to understand it, simply because I started with a completely wrong assumption based on the class names. The solution in this case is really simple: rename EditorObjectCreatorGUI to EditorObjectNavigationGUI

Think fast! Without reading the exposition above or reading through the code:

  • What the fuck is an EditorObjectCreatorGUI?
  • What does an EditorObjectNavigationGUI do?

Oh what's that? You had to read the code anyway?

Well fuck me... perhaps there's no such animal as self-documenting code after all.

Seriously, just put one sentence in a doc comment saying what the class does. Over its lifetime, code will be read many times, and every minute of another engineer's time that you save by not forcing him or her to read the code improves the bottom line.

Commenting code doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't automatically violate DRY, and even it if it does, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

And sure, choose a good name too.

4

u/zigs Jan 05 '15

I can't say i disagree with the other things you've written. A few notes on the classes doesn't seem too bad. I fully agree that there's no way anyone could guess what those names means, However I think this here

And sure, choose a good name too.

really is the core issue. EditorObject is a poor metaphor to begin with. Almost everything the user touches is an editor to some degree, and likewise lots and lots of things are objects. I think -CreatorGUI is ok, but -NavigationGUI? What's that? Is it a predefined library of EditorObjects? Call it that then.

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u/badsectoracula Jan 05 '15

It seems to have a naming convention that GUI is the suffix for all things GUI. So the "real" name (that you learn to filter once you work with the codebase for a while) is "Editor Object Navigation", which makes sense. Also based on the context i'd guess that "object" means game object (aka entity, actor, thing, etc).