Naming things in coding is always something of great debate, and important to give appropriate consideration, because it greatly influences readability. And readability -as we all know- is the second most important aspect of source code, the most important one being that it should work of course 🙂

There are competing naming styles; camelcase starting with or without a capital, underscores, all caps, etc. But I do not want to get into that, to each his own. Or her own. Personally I prefer the Java style, with the difference in naming between classes (CamelCase) and methods (camelCase), so I’m going to use that for the examples here.

What I would like to talk about is the concept of a “default verb”. As a rule of thumb class names are nouns; they’re a Factory, or a Singleton, or Person. And methods perform actions on classes, so their name should start with a verb; getName, createInstance, build, walk, …, they do something.