How to name things – thesaurus tip

I’m not particularly good at naming things (variables, methods, functions, classes, modules, etc.). Long time ago George (a colleague) and I were trying to think with “a better name” for a class but none of us had any good ideas. He suggested to use a thesaurus to check for synonyms, related words, etc. and start thinking which of the words would match it or not.

I thought that was a great idea! And actually it was mentioned very briefly at the talk “How to name things” from Peter Hilton (I saw it at ACCU 2015). If I were the presenter I would have explained the thesaurus method for naming things a bit more than he did.

One of the public results of the thesaurus method is my Github repository named potpourri (my first thought was “miscellaneous). Actually, the inspiration to have a github repository for small scripts and not named miscellaneous came when I saw mandrawer from Robert, another Mendeley colleague.