duck!

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday 15 October 2010 23:35:35 Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Kagamin, el 15 de octubre a las 17:16 me escribiste:
> > Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
> > > I was talking to Walter about Kenji's adaptTo. We both think it's a
> > > very powerful enabler, but adaptTo is a bland name. After discussing a
> > > few marketing strategies, I proposed "duck". It's short, simple, and
> > > evokes "duck typing".
> > 
> > 1. adaptTo helped me to understand what it does, while duck!Drawable
> > doesn't.
> 
> I agree, just "adapt" might be an option, it even has a precedence of
> something similar in Python (even when the PEP[1] was rejected, PEAK has
> an implementation[2]). But "duck" is really cryptic (as symbol names
> invented by Andrei usually are :).
> 
> [1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0246/
> [2] http://peak.telecommunity.com/protocol_ref/module-protocols.html

Considering that no one has presented a term which makes it immediately obvious 
what the function does and that the programmer is going to have to look it up 
regardless, I find duck to be a far better name since you're not going to mistake 
it for anything else. Adapt can and will be used it far more contexts that duck 
ever would be. duck is therefore more immediately recognizable and will not be 
ambiguous to the programmer. Sure, they're going to have to look it up, but 
they're going to have to look it up regardless of the name, so I think that the 
shorter and more memorable is a better name.

- Jonathan M Davis