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>"name it Steve" philosophy

I think of these kinds of names as being like primary key fields in a database: Their main purpose is to distinguish the identities of various things, so it's better not to incorporate any functional/behavioural description into them because that way there's never a need to change the name in the future if the behaviour changes.

The downside is that the names become arbitrary lumps of data that you have to become familiar with by rote use.




Primary keys in DBs should be natural keys in the first place. You use surrogate keys only to optimize things.

So the whole analogy now points in the exact opposite direction as stated.


What's an example of a natural key for a person, that never changes?




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