Java By Comparison

What Have You Learned?

Naming is one of the hardest tasks that you face in your day-to-day developer life. Bad naming usually doesn’t stop your code from compiling (so no compiler will help you to find really bad names), but it’ll make the code much harder to read and understand. And that can turn the maintenance of your code into a nightmare.

That’s why we’ve added this chapter on naming to the book. Good naming is less clear-cut and well defined than the problems you’ve seen in some of the other comparisons here. In our experience, you’re never done with proper naming. When you look at a piece of code that you’ve written some time ago, chances are you’ll find something to improve in naming, if only because you’ve had more time to get acquainted ...