this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
31 points (100.0% liked)

Experienced Devs

5085 readers
1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Domain-driven design includes the idea of a "ubiquitous language" where the engineers and the domain experts and the product owners come together and agree on terminology for all the domain concepts, and the project then uses that terminology everywhere.

But on the projects I've been involved with, much more common is a situation where the requirements docs mostly use one term but sometimes use a different name for the same thing because the docs were worked on by two people who disagreed on the terms, the designers decide they don't like how the words look so the UI calls the concept something else, the database developer reverses the term's word order to fit their personally-preferred schema naming conventions, the API designer invents a compound name that includes both the UI and the database names, and so on. (I only barely exaggerate.) Which names map to which other names becomes tribal knowledge that's usually not written down anywhere.

This kind of thing bugs me a lot, but I seem to be in the minority. I recognize that it makes very little functional difference, but it just feels sloppy to me and I don't like having to remember multiple names for things. I will usually advocate for renaming things in the code for consistency, and other people on the team will almost always agree that it's a good idea and will happily accept my PRs, but I'm usually the only one taking the initiative.

So, my question to you fine folks: am I wrong to care much about this? Do you think using consistent names for domain concepts across the board actually makes a meaningful difference in terms of code maintainability and discoverability? Or is the effort required to keep the names consistent over time actually greater than the mental overhead of working with the inconsistent names?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] isaiah@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I think I've learned to get less attached to opinionated terminology in code and database design because I see it happen all the time where the usage of the value/field/thing can evolve naturally over time as the business needs evolve. And refactoring field names (as an example) from UI to database is often a painful exercise, not without significant regression risks. (Depending on the size and complexity of your systems, of course)

So while I totally agree with you and others that ideally naming would be consistent throughout, my real world experience with the issue has taught me that this isn't the hill I die on.

My 2 cents from 10 years experience in the industry.