Rhetorical Strategies of Naming Practices in Code

The rhetorical significance of naming practices is widely understood, but it — and many other rhetorical dimensions of language — are often overlooked in the domain of software development, especially in regards to code languages and relevant practices (as demonstrated in file names, functions, variables, and so on). While naming conventions in code are typically recognized as inherently arbitrary, they are also tangled up in numerous networks of community expectations, constraints, and mores, whether organizational or interpersonally social in nature. Given Kenneth Burke's argument for the revealing and concealing influences of terministic screens upon our engagement with the world (by establishing ways of seeing and not seeing), naming conventions in code play an important role in how meaningful invention occurs for human developers and readers of code files. Despite the apparent triviality of such a component of software projects, naming practices shine a light on the goals and values of a programmer in addition to the functional intentions that they might have for the use of a given body of code.