Why naming is hard

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that one* of the hardest things in computer science is naming things.

Whilst probably true, I think this is mistaking a symptom for the cause. In a simple system naming is easy, but the problem is that simplicity is difficult. As Dijkstra put it:

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

* Strictly 0–2 as another one* of them is off-by-one errors. See also Martin Fowler’s bliki: “Two Hard Things”