A thoughtful coder once said that “it’s more important to have well organized code than any code at all.” Actually several leading coders have said this. So I’ll append my name to the end of that long linked list.
I’m trying to develop my own system for naming functions such that it’s relatively obvious what those functions do in a general sense. Apple, Google, Microsoft and more all have conventions and rules for naming functions. Apple’s conventions are the ones I know the best. For some reason Apple finds the word “get” unpleasing while “set” is unavoidable. So you’ll never see getTitle() as an Apple function name but you will see setTitle(). This feels a little odd to me as title() could be used to set or get a title but getTitle clearly does one job only. I know that title() without an argument can’t set anything but I’m ok with the “set” all the same.
So far I’m testing out the following function naming conventions:
- calcNoun(): dynamically calculates a noun based on the current state of internal properties
- cleanNoun(): returns a junk-free normalized version of a noun
- clearNoun(): removes any data from a noun and returns it to its original state
- createNoun(): statically synthesizes a noun from nothing
- updateNoun(): updates the data that a noun contains based on the current state of internal properties
- getNoun(): dynamically gets a noun from an external source like a web server
As you can see I like verbs in front of my nouns. In my little world functions are actions while properties are nouns.
calcNoun(), createNoun(), and getNoun() are all means of generating an object and with a semantic signal about the process of generation.
cleanNoun() returns a scrubbed version of an object as a value. This is really best for Strings and Numbers which tend to accumulate whitespace and other gunk from the Internet and user input.
clearNoun() and updateNoun() are both means for populating the data that an object contains that signal the end state of the updating process. (Maybe I should have one update function and pass in “clear” data but many times clearing is substantially different from updating.)
I hope this helps my code stay organized without wasting my time trying to map the purpose of a function to my verb-noun conventions!