Naming things

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 22 June 2015 at 11:45:31 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Saturday, 20 June 2015 at 09:27:16 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
> wrote:
>>
>> Two examples of controversial name pairs: setExt/setExtension, 
>> and toLower/toLowerCase. These functions have the same 
>> functionality, but one of them is eager, and the other is 
>> lazy. Can you guess which is which
>
> If I had to hazard a guess, I'd go with "the shorter one is 
> lazy", but that presumes I'd notice there were two 
> nearly-identical functions in the first place and pick up on 
> the not-well-conveyed implication that one is lazy and the 
> other is not.

Well, you'd be wrong. Although setExt is the lazy version of 
setExtension, toLowerCase is the lazy version toLower. Who needs 
consistency, eh?

> And it's a bad thing everyone seems to be tip-toeing around, 
> too.
>  None of the suggestions I've seen so far really call out to me 
> "hey, this is lazy and has a non-lazy counterpart".  Would it 
> be so wrong to add "lazy" to the beginning or end so it's super 
> obvious at a glance with zero cognitive overhead?

Just to reiterate, I want to stress that finding a perfect name 
is of secondary concern to deciding to change the name in the 
first place. A big part of the argument against renaming things 
is "look how much debate there is about what it should be called, 
it's obvious there is no consensus, let's just leave things as 
they are".