Even though there's a designated tag for naming, naming questions (like this one) are often frowned upon, disliked, even closed as off-topic on this site.
Are naming questions on-topic?
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- 2This question is similar to: On the troubles of naming and terminology. If you believe it’s different, please edit the question, make it clear how it’s different and/or how the answers on that question are not helpful for your problem.Basilevs– Basilevs2025-07-03 20:52:30 +00:00Commented Jul 3 at 20:52
- YesBasilevs– Basilevs2025-07-03 20:54:40 +00:00Commented Jul 3 at 20:54
- 1The question you gave as an example is not close-voted as off-topic, it is close-voted as "opinion-based". It falls very clearly into the category described in the accepted answer as "What should I name this thing?". If you click on the naming tag, you will get tons of examples which kind of naming questions are accepted by our community and which are not.Doc Brown– Doc Brown2025-07-03 21:59:40 +00:00Commented Jul 3 at 21:59
- ... note the naming convention question you posted 5 hours later was much better received by our community, currently it got already 4 upvotes and a few good answers. There are some stubborn hardliners in the community who refuse to see the difference, they will downvote/close vote every naming question, but don't take this personal. These people are IMHO from the autistic spectrum, they have trouble with themselves and cannot act differently-Doc Brown– Doc Brown2025-07-04 05:42:09 +00:00Commented Jul 4 at 5:42
- @DocBrown actually, I don't see the difference between the two myselfSergey Zolotarev– Sergey Zolotarev2025-07-04 11:53:57 +00:00Commented Jul 4 at 11:53
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1 Answer
From your comments, I guess your real question is not "Are naming questions on-topic?" (which was already asked in 2014 before, with some excellent answers which are still valid today), but
"I have asked these two questions about naming things, why is one better received than the other by the community?"
Well, I cannot read the minds of the voters, but for me
does not read like a question specificially about a Robot class, but about the principle how to name factory methods in general. That is a type of question our community accepts as suitable for the site, maybe because factory methods are a very frequently used concept, it is an issue which regular occurs to many people, and the question can be answered in a general fashion.
On the other hand,
is a question which I read first-and-foremost as "Please tell me how I should name my specific ComponentFinder wrapper class". And that's exactly the kind of question for which Robert Harvey's answer recommends closing - not because it is off-topic, but because its answer would be primarily opinion-based.
But perhaps this is just a question of wording. You may try to rewrite that question by focussing on naming conventions for wrappers in general, and make it clear your specific case is just an example for a more general issue (in between, I made an edit to the original question trying to do this - feel free to improve it even more) . I cannot guarantee the community will then vote differently, but it may be worth a try.
