Skip to main content

Meaningful Names - Code Review Checklist with Example

"Names are everywhere in software". "The hardest thing about choosing good names is that it requires good descriptive skills"[1]. In my previous post, I emphasized that we should take care our code, so now let's start with naming.

Issue
Original code
Revised code
Reveals nothing
int d; //elapsed time in days
int elapsedTimeInDays;
Difficult to understand
public List<Cell> getThem()

public List<Cell> getFlaggedCells()

Specific to programmers
accountList
accounts
Number-series
public void copyChars(char a1[], char a2[])
public void copyChars(char source[], char destination[])
Noise words (indistinguishable)
customerInfo vs customer;
accountData vs account
customer, account //distinguish names in such a way that the reader knows what the differences offer
Silly made-up words
class DtaRcrd02{
 private Date genymdhms;
}
class Customer{
 private Date generationTimestamp;
}
Poor name
for(int j=0 ;  j<34 ;  j++){
   s += (t[j]*4)/5;
}
int realDaysPerIdealDay = 4;
const int WORK_DAYS_PER_WEEK = 5;
const int NUMBER_OF_TASK = 34;
for(…)
Member prefixes
private String m_dsc; 
private String description;
Interfaces prefixes
IShapeFactory
ShapeFactory
Constructors with args
Complex point = new Complex(23.0)
Complex point = Complex.FromRealNumber(23.0)
//use static factory that describe the args
Form of colloquialisms or slang
eatMyShort()
abort()
Different methods name of different classes with same code base
fetch(), retrieve(), get()
get() //pick one word for one abstract concept and stick with it
Different class name in the same code base
Controller, manager, driver
Controller
The variable names are not clear when they are used alone in a method
street, houseNumber, city, state
//Solution 1: prefix addressStreet, addressHouseNumber, addressCity, addressState
//Solution 2: create a class Address

References:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool

Check out my implementation here Background I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or  here . Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU. rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were: 1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB 2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts 3. Persisting labeled texts into the database I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer 's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features. At first glance rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This too...

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent">  <div id="child">  </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{   position: relative;   overflow:hidden; } #child{   position: absolute;   top: -1;   right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...

Adding a default text to the beginning of an text area

I have a text area where I can enter a SQL statement. The text "SELECT TOP 1" is used at the begining of the sql statement as a default prefix that can not be removed. In order to archive this functionality, I found three options: 1. Use an inputMask and build a pattern for the entered text. We can use the prefix inside the text area: http://jsfiddle.net/SEXAj/2130/ 2. Create an javascript event listener on event "input" and calculate to prevent the prefix is removed http://jsfiddle.net/sarbbottam/TUc94/ 3. Use another html tag like "div"/"span" that contains the prefix and calculate the suitable position + Tag "span": http://jsfiddle.net/4YzZy/ + Tag "div": http://jsfiddle.net/215b34fs/ I chose the 3rd approach with tag "div" because it's the most easiest solution and suitable for me at that monment. References: [1].  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24846041/how-do-i-add-a-default-text...

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly".  Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr...