Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, 2nd Edition

4

Meaningful Names

by Tim Ottinger and Uncle Bob

Beginning in the late ’90s I ran a company named Object Mentor Inc. Our website sported a number of technical documents that we offered to the software community. The most downloaded of all those documents was Tim Ottinger’s rules for names. What you are about to read is the descendant and natural evolution of Tim’s classic document.

—Uncle Bob

Names are everywhere in software. We name our variables, our functions, our arguments, classes, and packages. We name our source files and the directories that contain them. We name our jar files and dll files and gem files. We name and name and name; ...