> As a matter of fact, judging by how many people give crap names to their stuff, I'd it's one of the most difficult task of designing something.

You're absolutely right, the two hardest things in programming are naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.

I swear I have to start coding with a thesaurus. I mean even basic variable names are sometimes hard to find words for. Say I define a list i aggregate output into which is returned at the end of the function. Do I call it output, output_list, result, result_list, result_l, r_list, o_l, output_l, o_list, aggregate, return_value, file_list, path_list, directory_list, dir_list, dir_l....

There's so many possibilities, some of the utterly rank, some of them decent, and a fair amount of good descriptors, but which one is best?

And that's just the naming of one variable. Then there's function names, module names, package names.

Is there some guides on this or something?

> output_list, result, result_list, result_l, r_list, o_l, output_l, o_list, aggregate, return_value, file_list, path_list, directory_list, dir_list, dir_l....

You're making it too hard, use normal whole words, call it "result" and be done with it; it's a temporary local variable, its name simply isn't that important. Class and method names are far more important because they have much larger scope.

Here's the trick to naming things well, name them and move on and then when you have to come back later-which you always do-guess what the name is; if you named it well, you guessed right. If you guessed wrong, rename it to match what you guessed it would be. Over time your naming will get better.

I prefer to name things after the major operation that is done with/to them and what they are if that not coveyed by the type. This is very imporant for strings (or array of string, etc) as the type tells you little about what that string is/for.

Using your style, variables would be named something like directory_aggregate, filtered_names, etc.