Functional programming and naming

#The CleanerUpper @jessitron wrote a post on some refactoring she’d done in Scala. But it was not the neat refactoring that got me thinking, it was the name of her class

class CleanerUpper(broom: Broom, 
                   rag: Dishcloth, 
                   wiper: MicrofiberTowel, 
                   config: CleanConfig) {
		   }

##OO and naming Naming has been a problem for me ever since I started programming Java. I don’t know how many Managers, Services, Helpers and Utils I’ve written through the years, not to forget the Creators, Factories and Homes. The problem arises from the fact that everything in OO needs a bloody name. And to be able extract stuff from other stuff when doing a refactoring, you need to put it somewhere, and that somewhere needs to have a name. Like CleanerUpperer.

##FP (or should I say Clojure) and naming Naming a bunch of things seems to be much simpler in Clojure. Had I been writing some cleaner stuff in Clojure, I guess I’d just made myself a cleaner namespace and I’d be done. Because you have functions they don’t have to live inside a noun, but rather just be a collection of stuff that do more or less similar things. If the cleaner namespace becomes too big, you just create another one like broom. No BroomManager needed.

##Problems in FP naming The one problem I am facing with regards to naming in fp is when you have a function that does something to a bunch of things:

(defn tranform
   "Takes a collection of foos and makes them into bars"
   [foos]
   (map #(...) foos))

This is all fine and dandy until the anonymous function becomes so complicated that you want to give it a name. What do you call it? Do you rename your original transform to transform-all and name your extracted function transform?

I really have no good answer for this.