naming-conventions

This was something originally discussed during a presentation given by Charles Brian Quinn of the Big Nerd Ranch at acts_as_conference . He was discussing what he had learned from instructing a Ruby on Rails Bootcamp to many people both new to programming and new to Rails. One particular slide that stood out was along the lines of never using foo and bar as examples when trying to teach someone to program . His reasoning was very simple. Which is easier to understand? baz = foo + bar or answer = first_number + second_number It's happened many times myself when explaining something and I

Is it possible to build (install, go get, etc) an executable with the name foobar if my Golang package name is one of the following: github.com/username/go-foobar github.com/username/foobar-tools and has main.go in the package root? Craig Kelly You can specify the executable name using the -o switch with go build . For your example it would look something like: cd $GOPATH/github.com/username/go-foobar && go build -o foobar . However, you're just left with the executable in the package's folder -- you still need to install it somehow. However, I don't know of any way to specify that for someone

I try to be rather descriptive with my function names, where possible. This occasionally results in function names in the twenty to thirty character range such as "GetActionFromTypeName" or "GetSelectedActionType". At what point do functions get too long to manage (not too long for the compiler)? If there's a shorter, but yet descriptive way to name the function, then the function name is too long. When you can't read them aloud anymore without taking a breath in the middle =D A function name is too long when it starts to either over-describe what it does, or when it hinders readability of the

We are deciding the naming convention for tables, columns, procedures, etc. at our development team at work. The singular-plural table naming has already been decided , we are using singular. We are discussing whether to use a prefix for each table name or not. I would like to read suggestions about using a prefix or not, and why. Does it provide any security at all (at least one more obstacle for a possible intruder)? I think it's generally more comfortable to name them with a prefix, in case we are using a table's name in the code, so to not confuse them with variables, attributes, etc. But