On the troubles of naming and terminology

Question

Difficulty with naming has a bit of a history with programming.

There are two hard problems in computer science: caching, naming, and off by one errors.

It has been repeatedly revisited on meta and elsewhere

• (P.SE Aug 2012) Question about naming conventions "not constructive"?
• (P.SE Oct 2011) Are "name that thing" questions on-topic?
• (P.SE Jan 2014) "Name that thing" questions
• (MSO Nov 2013) What is the appropriate / preferred method for questions concerning programming nomenclature?
• (Blog Feb 2012) Lets Play The Guessing Game

And yes, the guidance on these is confusing.

So, please answer:

• Are the terminology and naming questions on topic?
• If so, what should be expected of these questions to not be closed as custom, too broad, or primarily opinion?

Answer 1

As has been previously pointed out, this issue has already been discussed at length, with a resulting consensus that there are two categories of "naming things" questions that might actually be on-topic:

1. What is the name of this well-known concept?
2. Questions about "principles of naming things."

There is, however, one remaining category of questions which I feel should always be off-topic:

What should I name this thing?

Which is not a "guessing game" question; it is primarily opinion-based. There are literally an infinite number of such questions; none of them are at all interesting to experts unless they can be answered from a principle-based perspective, in a way that could help others improve their naming skills.

Answer 2

1. yes, absolutely, these questions are on-topic, and here's why I think so:

   • knowing the right word enables you to find a precise definition, and to search through the literature for more background information
   • knowing the right word enables effective communication. If you don't know what a "free variable" is, I think it would be nearly impossible to have a good discussion about them
   • the answers are rarely opinion-based. Most have been established in the literature and are well-defined.
   • in the few cases where there are multiple possible names, the question provides an opportunity to cover the exact differences between what the names refer to

2. criteria for good naming questions: here's some good answers. I would add that good naming questions:

   • focus on what already exists and has already been defined
   • aren't trying to come up with new names

3. let's keep in mind that a bad question is a bad question, and a lazy asker is a lazy asker. Ultimately, good users will (probably) generate good content, and abusize users will game, abuse, and damage the system, no matter how complicated or precise the rules are.

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Lastly, I have seen this comment appearing frequently under suspected naming questions:

This question appears to be off-topic because it is a "name that thing" question. "Name that thing" are bad questions for the same reasons that "identify this obscure TV show, film or book by its characters or story" are bad questions: you can't Google them, they aren't practical in any way, they don't help anyone else, and allowing them opens the door for the asking of other types of marginal questions. See http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/02/lets-play-the-guessing-game

I would like to request that users stop posting this. Oftentimes, it is inappropriate for the OP under which it was posted, because:

• you can google them (see #1 above)
• they are practical (see #1 above)
• they do help others. Of course they don't help everybody, but no question does.
• it uses unwarranted pejorative language ("guessing game")
• the linked blog has little to do with the OP under which the comment is pasted
  • the examples have nothing to do with precise terms such as "alpha substitution"
  • the intent of the question is totally different than a so-called "guessing game"

If you believe that a question is low quality, then (IMHO) please say why you think so, downvote it, or vote to close it. But please, do not copy-paste such comments when they don't apply. I believe it's simple harassment, incites pointless debate, turns off people from using the site and is unhelpful.

Answer 3

Much of the past guidance (from 2011, 2012 and 2014 linked above in the question) has suggested that these questions are off topic.

From Question about naming conventions "not constructive"?

Questions on StackExchange sites need to be presented in such a way that there can be an answer that is "the answer". As I read the question, every possible answer to it would be equally valid.

The question asks:

how should I represent the separate words in the filename?

I don't see how this can be answered where there aren't 15 different answers, giving 15 different opinions, all equally valid.

As for other naming convention questions being valid, thanks for bringing them up, we'll go through them and clean up those that slipped through the cracks. The fact that they exist on the site, doesn't make this one or any future questions more constructive.

As noted in Are "name that thing" questions on-topic?

I think there's a difference between questions that ask for a proper term for a concept and questions that ask for naming suggestions for a class or a method.

The former would be fine, in my opinion, but the latter do not belong on Stack Exchange for reasons of being both too localized and entirely discussion-oriented.

There are two types of name questions that are fairly consistently asked, though one can blend into the other. And we continue to get both types of questions - the "what should I name" and "what is the name of". This makes it difficult to provide the answer and easily risk getting too many poor quality answers.

^{Context: When this question was written, many naming questions were getting closed with a custom off topic message referencing Let's Play the Guessing Game. Prior to that questions were often being closed as "Not Constructive." This is saying that these questions are on topic, though frequently have other problems (getting closed as primary opinion or too broad when there isn't any help given to answers to say what a good answer to the question is nor inspiring answers that meet the ideals of Good Subjective, Bad Subjective. Furthermore, the questions often get down voted for lack of research. It is my hope that by following these points below that the questions can overcome these difficulties and have a chance at remaining open.}

These questions are marginally on topic. However, these questions are often poor and without additional information they should be closed as too broad or primarily opinion. Much of the historical guidance points to this being the case.

In an effort to try to make these questions better fit the Q&A format rather than being a poll of answers where "I think it is an XYZ" and "Have you considered XWZ?" we need to help the questions be better asked so that they don't generate one sentence answers and stay away from the questions not to ask so that they have the "long, not short, answers". From the blog post Good Subjective, Bad Subjective:

Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers. The best subjective questions inspire your peers to share their actual experiences, not just post a mindless one-liner or cartoon in hopes of being rewarded with upvotes for being merely “first.” Sharing an experience takes at least one paragraph; ideally several paragraphs. If I’m asking about how to bake cookies, don’t give me a list of grocery items: milk. butter. vanilla. eggs. There is virtually nothing I can learn from a short, static list of grocery items that make up a recipe. Instead, tell me what happened the last time you made cookies from that recipe! Share your detailed experiences, so that we all might learn from them.

To this end, we need to provide some guidance that will help people avoid asking the questions that will be nothing more than a poll of word ideas, pattern names, and guessing at what was intended (and would get closed as either primarily opinion or too broad). Secondly, we should try to help people ask questions that won't be down voted for "this question does not show any research effort" (from the mouseover text on the down vote triangle).

We have exactly the same problem that English.SE does with their own single word requests - lots of them, low quality, uninteresting, attract poor answers from users, and they get complained about in chat, they attract less active users and repel more active users.

Drawing from English.SE tag: single-word-requests and Against single word requests there is a set of questions that are necessary to make these questions better:

• Describe exactly the context that the name or terminology is used
  • Programming language - the same concept can be used in multiple ways. As I point out in Why is this question wrong? (asking for the name of a specific practice) and ultimately How is it called when you define constants that simply refer to a large namespace? there is sometimes no standard way to handle this across all programming languages.
  • Code example - without a demonstration of what the code is to do, multiple terms can be used for the same thing.
• Describe the criteria for acceptance
  • Without some criteria for acceptance of the term, there is no way to say which one is better than another and the question is simply a poll for people to toss out suggestions for a name.
• Which names/terms have you thought of and discarded as inappropriate?
  • Just asking for a name doesn't let us know which direction you have thought and as described in Why is research important? we need to know what you have already thought of and discarded.
• Does the question show that you searched for a suitable word before asking the question?
  • Without the information to show that you have tried, such questions reek of intellectual laziness. The use of Google is not hard. Sometimes these words are right there if you just enter the language of choice and the code construct you are working with. Stack exchange is not and should never be a "I don't know, I'll ask what its called on P.SE and see if anyone answers"

Given the above pieces of information being provided in the question, it might be acceptable to keep the question open.

I also strongly want people to look at the English.SE tags: https://english.stackexchange.com/tags and note that Single-word-requests on that site make up an average of 30/week or about 1/5^th of all of their questions on a day to day basis.

Do we, P.SE, want to have a similar bit of 1/5th of our questions be questions about what to name some 'pattern' or what a particular structure is called within some code?