Russian Novel Programming

One of the things that makes Russian novels hard to read, at least for Americans, is that characters have multiple names. For example, in The Brothers Karamazov, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov is also called Alyosha, Alyoshka, Alyoshenka, Alyoshechka, Alexeichik, Lyosha, and Lyoshenka.

Russian novel programming is the anti-pattern of one thing having many names. For a given program, you may have a location in version control, a location on your hard drive, a project name, a name for the program executable, etc. Each of these may contain slight differences in the same name. Or major differences. For historical reasons, the code for foo.exe is in a project named ‘bar’, under a path named …

I thought about this today when looking into a question about a program. A single number had different names in several different contexts. There’s the text label on the desktop user interface, the name of the C# variable that captures the user input, the name of the corresponding C++ variable when the user input is passed to the back-end numeric code, and the name of used in the XML file that serializes the variable when it goes between a database and a web server. Of course these should all be coordinated, but there were understandable historical reasons for how things got into this state.