Bad Managers?

Alan Green doesn’t like the word “manager” used as a class name suffix. His point seems to be that “manager” is imprecise and instead he suggests a list of alternative suffixes with more precise meaning; though they seem to be rather contrived and smack of using new words just for the sake of it to me. For example using “Herder” rather than the more usual “Collection” (PolicyHerder, hmm…) and using “Bucket” as a pretty non standard replacement for “Pool”. He also suggests using Supervisor which seems, to me at least, to be potentially as vague as Manager and just, well, different. Whilst I can see his point, “Manager”, like other name suffixes can be overused, I disagree that it’s bad enough to include in his list of other banned suffixes and prefixes. I agree with the other entries in his list though.

At first I thought that I suffer from overuse of the “Manager” suffix but having just glanced through some recent source I see clear distinction between Collections , Pools, Allocators, Monitors and Converters (they all pretty much do what they say on the tin), as well as a few Managers that, well, manage things. So I agree, be careful that everything doesn’t become a “Manager” by default but you may find that you do need one or two…

Via Jeff Atwood from his Vertigo Software (work) blog.