“Naming is difficult. When you name, you are literally exerting mind control. Use it wisely."
Tags: naming , object-oriented , philosophy , and language Why is naming so difficult? We write functions and arguments, or classes and methods, all day long. Every one of them has a name. With all that practice, you would expect us to be good at it. One reason is that names are always metaphors. When we say "open a socket", no actual opening happens. Our servers don't grow new orifices like a Transformer. All it means is that we arrange some memory like this and make that entry in a table (a metaphor of its own!) in the kernel (metaphor) of the operating system (metaphor). In Metaphors We Live By , George Lakoff shows how entirely embedded we are in metaphors. They go much deeper than our primary school teachers have told us. Deep metaphors are ideas such as "Love is War," or "Happy is Up." Sometimes we form compound metaphors, which gain richness through their interactio...