Naming things

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 22 June 2015 at 11:51:27 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 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".

I think that it's abundantly clear that the names are not well 
chosen. It's a guarantee that you're going to have to look at the 
docs to have any clue as to which is lazy and which isn't. I 
completely agree with adding lazy versions of the functions like 
Walter is doing, and our naming situation sucks on some level 
given that we have never named things based on whether they were 
lazy or not, and so there really is no way that all of the names 
in Phobos are going to be consistent in that manner (not without 
breaking more code than we're willing to break anyway), but the 
new names do seem particularly bad. A function that starts with 
set doesn't even sound like it's lazy anyway - not to mention, 
wasn't setExt the old function that std.path had before it was 
revamped?

Naming stuff is hard, but there is definitely a cost to poor 
names, which is something that Walter rarely seems to 
acknowledge, especially if it means changing an existing name - 
but since this is about functions that haven't even been released 
yet, I wouldn't think that it would be as big a deal to change 
them.

- Jonathan M Davis