What are the great function/method/etc. names in popular libs/languages?

Naming things is hard, but what are the ones that have stood out to you as great choices that have stood the test of time?

Comments

[Ben Halpern]

I thought to make this thread based on a conversation I was having in @aspittel 's great clean coding post.

Ben Halpern

Jul 23

I love React's dangerouslySetInnerHTML which replaces a lot of documentation and comments and forces the user to understand what's going on. If you don't know why it says "dangerous", you can look it up.

Much better than

//This is dangerous, read this post about XSS:
setInnerHTML

Because the comment would never get ported across all the use cases (obviously, given it's a library).

But most code doesn't live up to the scrutiny of library code and comments, used properly, are a perfectly reasonable part of the toolbelt.

[Hugo Di Francesco]

unless in Ruby, although it's more of an operator.

Everything in JavaScript (not a fanboy of course), I can't think of a specific method that's named right but I also can't think of any that are named wrong 🤔.

[Ben Halpern]

Operators are allowed—and anything related to the idea of naming things.

I too really like unless, though I see it get overused sometimes where ! would be clearer.

[Eric Curtin]

"if (!" is clearer to most devs as it is available in more languages than "unless".

[Javier Garcia]

.NET's FirstOrDefault() method when accessing LINQ. I find it super clear :)

[Ben Halpern]

Less clear along those lines is the ||= operator.

What does ||= do?

Alex

#explainlikeimfive#ruby

[robencom]

Hey, PHP has the coolest operator: the SPACESHIP operator <=>

[kip]

The <=> is for evaluation and ||= is for assigment, the ?? null coalescing operator is more close to it but are not the same.

[Chad Smith]

Now only if I could convince people to quit thinking FirstOrDefault will always return null if it can't find anything.

It does what it says it does, default value. It just so happens that for objects that is null
(I say this because I had to prove to someone once that their if statement would always evaluate to true. Lol)

[Tyler Warnock]

I always chuckle at React's componentDidMount vs Vue's mounted

[Burdette Lamar]

I love Ruby's naming conventions foo? and foo!.

The former is for a method that returns a boolean (like IsFoo in some languages):

irb(main):006:0> s = 'abc'
=> "abc"
irb(main):007:0> s.empty?
=> false

The latter for a method that may do something possibly unexpected, such as modifying a given argument:

irb(main):001:0> s = 'abc'
=> "abc"
irb(main):002:0> s.reverse
=> "cba"
irb(main):003:0> s
=> "abc"
irb(main):004:0> s.reverse!
=> "cba"
irb(main):005:0> s
=> "cba"

[Thomas Landin]

It's not that the name itself is great, but Python's len() keeps reminding me how well thought-out the early Python language was.

One global function with a short but intuitive name that consistently does exactly what you expect it to no matter what data structure you throw at it.

[Rob Hoelz]

Perl's Carp module has some interesting naming choices:

# warn user (from perspective of caller)
carp "string trimmed to 80 chars";

# die of errors (from perspective of caller)
croak "We're outta here!";

# die of errors with stack backtrace
confess "not implemented";

Not to mention that Perl introduces lexical variables with the my keyword, and package variables with the our keyword!

[Shalvah]

confess 😂😂

[jakebman]

And those were named to fit the model of die (exit, failing, with message)

Also Perl's or operator is intentionally lower precedence than almost anything else so you can:

my $file = open '/dev/zero' or die "Couldn't open file";

"OR DIE!"

[ItsASine (Kayla)]

Testing frameworks are fun for this because by nature of what the code does, it ends up being a source of truth for how the app behaves. Thus, the test specs can kind of read like documentation.

Assuming var thing = 10;

Some Jasmine:

expect(thing).toBeTruthy();

expect(thing).not.toBeLessThan(5);

expect(thing).toBeGreaterThanOrEqualTo(5);

expect(thing).toEqual(10);

expect(new Promise(thing)).toEqual(10);

Some Mocha with Chai:

thing.should.be.a('number');

thing.should.equal(10);

expect(thing).to.equal(10);

expect(new Promise(thing)).to.eventually.equal(10);

I also just like the punny names of testing languages, to be honest.

[Ben Halpern]

Yeah, I find this especially true in Ruby, where whitespace rules can make things almost plain english (though some take this way to far. It's a balance)

[Nimmo]

Maybe in Elm, not only because it's descriptive (Maybe it has a value, and Maybe it doesn't), but when it doesn't have a value, instead of null or undefined or whatever, it's Nothing.

Which makes me think of Nathan Explosion whenever I use it.

youtube.com/watch?v=o_PMab-SGgY

[kip]

A common problem in PHP (maybe in some other langs too) is the way to move between dates and get the incorrect value, for example when you decrease or increase a month(s):

>>> (new \DateTime('2017-01-31'))->add(new \DateInterval('P1M'))->format('Y-m-d')
=> "2017-03-03"

Carbon a good library offers some methods to avoid this behaivor and their names are really good:

>>> (new Carbon('2017-01-31'))->addMonthNoOverflow()->format('Y-m-d')
=> "2017-02-28"

If you wanna get the calculation with this behaivor, no problem:

>>> (new Carbon('2017-01-31'))->addMonthWithOverflow()->format('Y-m-d')
=> "2017-03-03"

Other methods are: createMidnightDate, localeHasDiffOneDayWords, createSafe...