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Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Nameless things within namless things

So, I got to thinking again about one of my pet notions - names/identifiers - and the unreasonable amount of time IT people spend naming things, then mapping them to other names, then putting the names into categories that are .... named.... aliasing, mapping, binding, bundling, unbundling, currying, lamdizing, serializing, reifying, templating, substituting, duck-typing, shimming, wrapping...

We do it for all forms of data. We do it for all forms of algorithmic expression. We name everything. We name 'em over and over again. And we keep changing the names as our ideas change, and the task to be accomplished changes, and the state of the data changes....

It gets overwhelming. And when it does, we have a tendency to make matters worse by adding another layer of names. A new data description language. A new DSL. A new pre-processor.

Adding a new layer of names often *feels* like progress. But it often is not, in my experience.

Removing the need for layers of names is one of the great skills in IT in my opinion. It is so undervalued, the skill doesn't have um, a, name.

I am torn between thinking that this is just *perfect* and thinking it is unfortunate.