[dblotsky]

Hard agree with the idea of greppability, but hard disagree about keeping names the same across boundaries.

I think the benefit of having one symbol exist in only one domain (e.g. “user_request” only showing up in the database-handling code, where it’s used 3 times, and not in the UI code, where it might’ve been used 30 times) reduces more cognitive load than is added by searching for 2 symbols instead of 1 common one.

[plorkyeran]

I’ve also found that I sometimes really like when I grep for a symbol and hit some mapping code. Just knowing that some value goes through a specific mapping layer and then is never mentioned again until the spot where it’s read often answers the question I had by itself, while without the mapping code there’d just be no occurrences of the symbol in the current code base and I’d have no clue which external source it’s coming from.

[runevault]

Probably depends on how your system is structured. if you know you only want to look in the DB code, hopefully it is either all together or there is something about the folder naming pattern you can take advantage of when saying where to search to limit it.

The upside to doing it this way is it makes your grepping more flexible by allowing you to either only search the one part of the codebase to see say DB code or see all the DB and UI things using the concept.

[gregjor]

I have mixed thoughts on this too. Fortunately grep (rg in my case) easily handles it:

rg -i ‘foo.?bar’ finds all of foo_bar, fooBar, and FooBar.

[Noumenon72]

Not to mention the readability hit from identifiers like foo.user_request in JavaScript, which triggers both linters and my own sense of language convention.

[emn13]

Both of those are easy to fix. You'll adapt quickly if you pick a different convention.

Additionally, I find that in practice such "unusual" code is actually beneficial - it often makes it easy to see at a glance that the code is somehow in sync with some external spec. Especially when it comes to implicit usages such as in (de)serialization, noticing that quickly is quite valuable.

I'd much rather trash every languages' coding conventions than use subtly different names for objects serialized and shared across languages. It's just a pain.