"A", "an", and "the" in method and function names: What's your take? [closed]

Question

I'm sure many of us have seen method names like this at one point or another:

• UploadTheFileToTheServerPlease
• CreateATemporaryFile
• WriteTheRecordToTheDatabase
• ResetTheSystemClock

That is, method names that are also grammatically-correct English sentences, and include extra words purely to make them read like prose. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of such "literal" method names, and prefer to be succint, while still being as clear as possible. To me, words like "a", "an", and "the" just look plain awkward in method names, and it makes method names needlessly long without really adding anything useful. I would prefer the following method names for the previous examples:

• UploadFileToServer
• CreateTemporaryFile
• WriteOutRecord
• ResetSystemClock

In my experience, this is far more common than the other approach of writing out the lengthier names, but I have seen both styles and was curious to see what other people's thoughts were on these two approaches.

So, are you in the "method names that read like prose" camp or the "method names that say what I mean but read out loud like a bad foreign-language-to-English translation" camp?

Answer 1

I'll agree that prose methods suck with one exception:

Unit Test Cases

These are generally never called in your code and show up in test reports. As such, it's handy to have readouts with a bit more prose:

• AddingACustomerOrderFailWhenCustomersIdIsInvalid : Failed
• OutOfBoundsPriceReturnsAnError : Passed
• CanDeleteAnEventFromASeason : Passed

Even this should be done sparingly, but I can see it as at least one case where grammatical additions can make it a little easier to express what passed and what failed. This is, of course, unless your language/framework provides a good mechanism for test-descriptions in the test readout other than method names, in which case ignore this one too.

Answer 2

To paraphrase Lawrence from Office Space...

No, no, man, I do believe that if someone I worked with around here named a function 'UploadTheFileToTheServerPlease', he'd get his a-- kicked, man.

Answer 3

Such "long" names do not sound like prose. When alone—perhaps, but accompanied with the rest of the code, they just make more of a mess. Check it out:

bool ResultOfTheUpload
      = UploadTheFileToTheServerPlease(TheNameOfTheFile, TheServersAddress);

Yuuuuk!..

This isn't a valid English text, and in no programming language will it look like one. So there's no sense in spending bytes on articles.

Answer 4

From programmers perspective "UploadFileToServer" makes more sense and easier to read and understand than "UploadTheFileToTheServerPlease".

More than English grammar, readability and understandability matters more in programming!

Answer 5

Given how many typos my life features, I'd end up with

* UploadTehFileToTehServerPleaz
* WriteTehRecordToTehDatabase
* ResetTehSystemClock
* ICanHazTehCheezburger

Seriously, I would even look at what my class name was as well. If my class was called "File", I would probably just go with

*UploadToServer
*DownloadFromServer

So it would be

   File file = new file;
   file.UploadtoServer(ServerAddress);

Just a trivial example, but hopefully that's illustrative enough.

Answer 6

I personally don't care. I've seen them and they don't bother me. I didn't even think about them until another programmer went on a rant about them. I found it shocking that somebody would care so much about something that matters so little. I mean he was actually angry about it. But that was early in my career, about 11 years ago, and since then I have found that developers being angry about minor things is actually quite common. It is why managers of developers get paid so well. They have to deal with developers on a daily basis.

And I would rather see that than "UL_FlToSrv".