Naming Interfaces
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An innocent question raised by Ayende has started an interesting debate on the comments.
In short (read it all there - don’t be lazy)
Which interface name is better?
a. IRecognizeFilesThatNeedToBeIgnored
b. IIgnoreFilesSpecification
with a single method: ShouldBeIgnored(string file);
Some were in favour of a, some in favour of b.
The interesting thing is that many has offered a third option:
c. IFileFilter
Let’s group these things:
- Options a. and b. => Narrow and very specific interfaces. You can guess exactly what a class implementing them can do.
- Option c. => a general-purpose interface. You’d know that a class that implement this type of interface is doing stuff with files, but it’s kinda vague. Can it filter a file out of a list of files? can it filter the content of a file? can it do other kinds of filtering on some kinds of files?
Personally I couldn’t care less which one of the first type will be used. I slightly in favour of b., as I think funny names are good. The compiler cares nothing about names, but the human mind would remember the purpose well, and a newcomer would pick it up quickly.
The second group (IFileFilter) is not good. It might get filled with a lot of methods that do file filtering.and if it’s not, I think it should reflect the intention of the implementing class.Since multiple interfaces per class are allowed, it’s ok to have specialised ones.