10 Programming Best Practices to Name Variables, Methods, Classes and Packages

10 Programming Best Practices to Name Variables, Methods, Classes and Packages

What's in name? "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" is a famous quote from William Shakespeare's classic Romeo and Juliet, but sorry to say, name matter a lot in programming and coding.  It's also said that code is the best document for any software, because any other document or comments can become outdated quickly, but code will always tell you truth; If code is then best document than names are most critical element of it. Every effort, small or big, invested while naming variables or methods, pays in both short term and long term. In fact, if you ask me just one coding practice to follow, It would definitely recommend giving meaningful names to your variables and methods. One reason, I push for this coding practice is because it improves readability of any algorithm or program drastically. Since every programmer spends more time reading code than writing, It would make a lot of sense to give meaningful names to your programming element. Readability is also one of the most important aspect of clean code. If you happen to read Clean code, the book by Uncle Bob, you would have seen a whole chapter on meaningful names, this just shows how important it is to name your variable, methods, classes and packages properly. Though these programming best practices are given from a Java programmer's perspective, they are equally useful in any other programming language. In fact, most of them are independent of any programming language and can be used while writing bash script, SQL stored procedures, C++ code and any other computer program. In fact you will value these practices more in case of shell script and database stored procedure because they don't have tools as smart as Java IDEs.