Granny Engineering

Friday, November 26, 2004

If your grandma needs to keep a list of her contacts, she'll create a table whose columns are named Last Name, First Name, Date Of Birth, City, Street, and so on.

If a software developer creates tables for a configuration management system, the tables' columns will be named Category, System, Domain, Type, Kind, and so on.

Don't know what data goes into which column? See, that's what the documentation is for.

Well, I say that choosing an abstract noun whenever it's time to pick a name is a sure sign that one doesn't understand the problem domain in question.