[creer]

Discipline? Doesn't the fine article point it out themselves? Carefully chosen degree of meaning embedded in an identifier has many practical uses. After that what matters is the tradeoff: Choosing well what gets embedded or doesn't - and so what will require a lookup always or only occasionally? And additional headaches such as caching that lookup? Choosing well which libraries code-in the embedding - as opposed to all over the place? Not trusting that the embedding is "self-documenting"? Etc, etc.

The author provides several examples, and they were all chosen because there was a benefit. Although some were poorly chosen like a group name rather than a function (everyone remembers individuals' emails rather than functions). Whether it was worth it is easy to dispute after that choice caused a headache but is "sore loser bias": it doesn't account for all the worthwhile effective choices elsewhere. Nor does it account for the effectiveness it bought the project in the meantime.

All the way to the extreme: do we prefer blog URLs that mention at least some category, date and a few words of subject line. Or do we go with opaque machine generated ones? Several lines long for good measure? Does the fact that you will never have to rename the opaque ones justify inflicting them on the users? How likely are you to ever rename? Some people will still choose the opaque URL! Do they earn points with their readers?

[srvaroa]

> Nor does it account for the effectiveness it bought the project in the meantime.

This is a great point! I should have mentioned in the article, but in the examples mentioned part of the nuisance was that people involved could envision alternative solutions that would have also been effective without causing most of the long lasting trouble.

But, sometimes that's not possible (I do mention that they are not always avoidable)