Programmers name everything. Patterns, packages, classes, functions, and variables. They all have names. And those names exist to communicate information to other developers about the purpose, role, and behavior of a given artifact. Today, on Twitter, I was informed that the software industry doesn’t need to align on the definitions of common programming names. Instead, we only need to ensure that the members of a given team share the same definitions for a set of names. Is that true?
First, let’s handle the obvious. Of course a team needs to share technical definitions. If the person sitting next to you edits or reviews your code, and that person doesn’t know what you mean when you say “manager” or “controller”, then he can’t effectively check the validity of your code, or adjust it. There’s no disagreement here. A team must work together and part of working together is working with a…
