However you mental wrap the process of realizing virtual things (writing, accretion, rose gardening), there’s no question literary-ness does imprint at some point on IDE surfaces. In my experience working in the higher stories of the tower (cloudgineering, we so high): up there with web pages, casually cast instructions inRuby and JavaScript, cascades in hierarchical CSS computer notation, and declarative document formatters (XML, HTML); up here you’re definitely notating control flows and arguments that require semblances to English lang. Arguments. Computer languages.

The other day I surprised myself by forming an excited opinion during code review about what a variable should be called. I guess the time had done arrived; I had spent just enough time in Ember and client state management to become OCD about the signifiers being passed around. And so I found myself feeling incomplete when I read over a line of code announcing a state change event that facetChanged. I can’t totally explain it but this wording felt insufficient. I instinctively wanted more. Needed surge troops. Something like…facetDidChange.

The difference is slight, but important.

(It’s hard, y’all. One of two things.)

I researched the grammar to figure out why the variable was letting me down.

Turns out the “do” helping verb isn’t a special thing. But when added to another verb in the preterite, it increases emphatic assertion heaping deeper credibility on the thing that did happen. You can really feel it on your brain tongue, right? The additional slam ofd in the phrase, like doors shutting — the hardness more certain.

Or maybe the reassurance is there because of the influence of the black/southern dialect on modern American english; the Shakespearian-like emphasis where past finality is hammered home when something done happened, or 2x emphasized when someone done did.

The code doth protest too much??

Eh, I didn’t push for a rewrite in the code review. Naming is a bar brawl and sometimes you fight and sometimes you don’t. The author is balancing empathy for their colleagues with their own mental frame of the application at the moment they create the code; and then there are many an english word and conventional abbreviations, degrees of formality and tone. There’s a reason Steve McConnell dedicates 30 pages on The Power of Variable Names. And this section doesn’t even explicitly tackle naming receivers, subscribers, etc…

Just tryna make sense of what these users be doing.