Word order for names [closed]

Question

I'm working with a team of non-native English speakers and I'm struggling to come up with a rule that explains why a method should be called getFilePath and not getPathFile.

Examples of this bad naming come up on a daily basis and except for just pointing out the better name, I cannot figure out a good way to explain why words should be in a specific order, except for "It how it's written in English". Especially for variable names like this one since none of its components are adjectives.

I realize this is very basic and probably second nature to everyone here, but I think that's why I'm struggling to figure out how to explain it to people who don't understand it.

How would you explain it?

Answer 1

Solution 1:

Tell your team that the verb is related to the last word of the identified, and that the other words in-between give additional details, the importance of which is decreasing from right to left. So, if they want to get a path it's getPath(). If they want to say it's the path of the file, they add the detail in-between getFilePath(). if this file path is long, they could add this extra detail: getLongFilePath().

Conversely, you can propose a self-assessment test: would a simplified identifier with only the first and last word still be accurate ?

    getPath() -> getPath() :  ok 
    getFilePath() -> getPath() : ok
    getPathFile() -> getFile() : not ok, because the string of the path is not a file descriptior.  

Solution 2:

Organise some workshop on writing better identifiers. The best would be to do this with a language trainer who could focus on how to build nice simple nominal group in English.

Answer 2

I cannot figure out a good way to explain why words should be in a specific order, except for "It how it's written in English"

That's because it is the only reason for writing it this way.

There is a naive view that there is a consensus that all programming should be done in american English. But this isn't really the case, let the developers choose names that they understand. Add intellisense comments for alternate languages

Answer 3

"File Path" is a noun phrase. You want to find a way to explain the syntax of noun phrases in english, in particular where the head noun appears (at the end in this and similar phrases), and that the the value returned should be an instance of the thing named by the head noun.

Your function presumably returns a path, in particular the path of a file. If you swap the words you would imply that it would return a file, of the sort that relates to a path.