Don’t go into programming if you don’t have a good thesaurus

Many programmers feel that naming things in their code is not only the hardest task they face, but also one of the most important

Last week I wrote a piece about the hardest tasks programmers have to do. It was based primarily on a recent discussion thread on Quora. Based on the responses and the votes, there was a clear number one, hardest task for software developers: naming things (e.g., variables, classes, functions, procedures, etc.).

I found this result somewhat surprising, as it wouldn’t have been my own personal choice based on my years as a developer (I think I would have voted for “Working with someone else’s code”). But what really surprised me was the margin by which naming was the number one choice. It wasn’t even close. Here’s how it broke down:


The results were based on 4,500 votes developers provided on Quora and an older Ubuntu Forums thread. Naming things got (just about) as many votes as the next 8 hardest tasks combined. Wow!

Yes, these are totally non-scientific results based on the input from a self-selecting group. But still, I think this tells us something significant. Namely, that naming things really is tricky, which many non-programmers probably don’t even realize.

There was a thread on StackExchange a few years ago about this very topic. To emphasize the point, here are some more quotes from programmers about the pain and difficulty of naming:


by phil johnson