Bad practice to repeat class name in property names?

Question

Suppose I have a class called Person with a property for their name.

Is it bad practice to name that property "personName"? Wouldn't just "name" suffice since "person" is implied already?

Then you end up with syntax like: person.personName, which looks silly and redundant

But I see it all over the place so I'm not sure if it was a good practice or bad practice — cas5nq, Aug 22 '14 at 20:41

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 22 '14 at 20:22

1

IMHO it is redundant, and I only do that if a second name (in this case) would be needed so that anyone could know the difference.

answered Aug 22 '14 at 20:22

Luis Font

70
4

What if Person has two properties: name and companyName, the latter of which is derived from a foreign key relation to a Company table. In this case would it appropriate to leave the person's own name as just "name" rather than being redundant, since Person is the implied context unless otherwise stated? This is how I think intuitively. – cas5nq Aug 22 '14 at 20:37

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 22 '14 at 20:24

Be verbose enough to be clear, but extra words that add no information are just noise and make code harder to read and understand. In this case, any reference to a Person carries the type information and (we hope) a label indicating the variable's role. Adding the class name to the field name contributes nothing, and it should be omitted.

Bad practice to repeat class name in property names?

2 Answers2