In a code review that I did today, I left a final note to the author of some new piece of code:

Sorry for nitpicking on code naming. The approaches you take are good, but naming is hard (but important!):

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

(see here a list of variations on these two hard problem ‘jokes’ in Computer Science)

I enjoy the ruby programming language because you can get a long way by just assuming things. A collection implements each, every object has nil?, in rails, I can get the relationship of a record and use scopes to filter the relationships as defined in the class of that related record. If it ands with a questionmark, it returns a boolean(y). Anyway.

So while they might say: “never assume things”, and sure, a lot of things are chaos, but ideally not our code base :) I prefer to work from assuming t…