Not OP, but we wouldn't need to worry so much about picking out distinct greppable names
if (big if) there were tools that parsed the code to draw out concepts for us, ex:
1. The popular "Find Usages" which varies widely in accuracy and reliability by language, IDE, and codebase meta-quirks.
2. Tools that show Callee/Caller trees, and sometimes possible data-flows between variables.
3. DSLs to search hierarchies, like how XPath lets you find XML elements based on nesting, rather than relying on a distinctly greppable single tag-name for the leaf you're interested in. (e.g. `<Product><Name>` vs `<ProductName>`)
When things go well, the actual variable name no longer needs to restate certain aspects and relationships that can instead be found through metadata.
For example, `GiftCard.purchaser_customer_uuid` is nicely greppable, but you could relax that to `GiftCard.purchaser` if it had a static type of `UUID<Customer>`. Or perhaps you could go to the `Customer.uuid` definition and say "Show me all variables that can populate or be-populated-by this one, up to X steps out, and excluding ones that are function scoped."
That said, I do advocate for "greppability" as a general practice, since I seldom trust that languages, tools, or institutions will come together in a way that makes it unnecessary.
1. The popular "Find Usages" which varies widely in accuracy and reliability by language, IDE, and codebase meta-quirks.
2. Tools that show Callee/Caller trees, and sometimes possible data-flows between variables.
3. DSLs to search hierarchies, like how XPath lets you find XML elements based on nesting, rather than relying on a distinctly greppable single tag-name for the leaf you're interested in. (e.g. `<Product><Name>` vs `<ProductName>`)
When things go well, the actual variable name no longer needs to restate certain aspects and relationships that can instead be found through metadata.
For example, `GiftCard.purchaser_customer_uuid` is nicely greppable, but you could relax that to `GiftCard.purchaser` if it had a static type of `UUID<Customer>`. Or perhaps you could go to the `Customer.uuid` definition and say "Show me all variables that can populate or be-populated-by this one, up to X steps out, and excluding ones that are function scoped."
That said, I do advocate for "greppability" as a general practice, since I seldom trust that languages, tools, or institutions will come together in a way that makes it unnecessary.