Code Smell 96 — My Objects
You don’t own objects.
Published in
1 min readOct 25, 2021
TL;DR: don’t use my as a name prefix.
Problems
- Lack of context
- Bijection Fault
Solutions
1. Remove “my” prefix.
2. Change to a role suggesting name.
Context
Several old tutorials use the word ‘my’ as a lazy name.
This is vague and lead to context mistakes.
Sample Code
Wrong
Right
Detection
[x] Automatic
We can tell our linters and static checkers to search for this prefix and warn us.
Tags
- Naming
Conclusion
Avoid using my.
Objects change according to the usage context.
More Info
Thinking about my experience of modifying code, I see that I spend much more time reading the existing code than I do writing new code. If I want to make my code cheap, therefore, I should make it easy to read.
Kent Beck
This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.
