In my previous post, I explored why deixis is helpful, how it shows up in our language, and how its use in source code is hampered by limitations in our current programming ecosystems.

I promised I’d explain how we could remedy this problem to increase the expressiveness of our code… That’s what this post is all about.

It starts with names

The magic that makes the web “hyper” is not really in tags. Sure, we use ... to point at something–but there are other ways to point. As I said in my previous post, line numbers point. Method names in source code point at their decl or their impl. Statements like using namespace std point. Names of build-time dependencies in maven pom.xml files point.

The real magic is that the web has so many things to point to. It has names (notice where “name” appears in the previous paragraph). Every resource–even ones that are dynamically generated–has a URL. Individual paragraphs or tables or images inside a resource can have names, which lets us point to them, too.

We value names.

So, if names are so valuable, part of how we make code more “hyper” is to increase the availability of names. Here are some ways to do that.

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