Naming is the most important part of design. Concise yet meaningful names are hugely important.

One of my favorite tips is to shortcut ‘rename in file’ in Eclipse as Ctrl-~.

For parameters or variables, however, I prefer either math names or meaningful names — customer, name, customerName, id, value, val, x, str, text, obj.

I never ever use ‘foo’. Is foo a name, an ID, a value, an object? “Foo” is no shorter, but is definitely less informative.

When “foo” is used, I sometimes get the impression that the fact that it’s meaningless is almost a conceit. This seems to me like an anti-pattern in naming & communication.