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by PaulHoule 1657 days ago
Names are hard. When you have 10 of something you can reconcile the ontological needs (e.g. unique id for unique concept or entity) and ‘understandable’ names.

Wikipedia URLs hover on the edge of what is possible but look close and you see temporal stability is poor and often the ontological properties are wrong. (E.g. you can’t say that a Boeing 777 has a certain weight or length because there are various variants of it that don’t have individual Wikipedia pages, same is true for fighter jets, car models, etc.)

When you have a million entities you are often better off using randomly generate UUID’s. People won’t know what they mean but at least sound reasoning would be possible over the domain.

1 comments

So you're suggesting that instead of names, we refer to UUID's when talking about a service?
It all depends on how many different entities you are talking about. If N gets high enough, "meaningful names" will break down.