cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/109997

I’ve seen in programming that apparently naming things like variables or files is hard (?). So that could be a topic of discussion. I’m not sure if it’s felt that hard, to me.

I have encountered a lot of problems with downloading files with irregular filenames, and then I can’t find them, though. I’m guessing maybe that’s on me to manually put the filename in whenever I download these things, but I guess sometimes I might just click “save” and the name of the file is not like a description of the file and it makes it difficult to find them when searching for them.

Now on the other hand, sometimes people don’t want the files labeled so that people find them easily, so that’s another issue too.

I’ve also wondered if a motion could be made to get more websites to automatically update certain filenames with titles of the page; for example, say a book on archive.org is gibberish, and you could select an option to automatically set that filename to the title of the page which would presumably be the name of the book.

Has anyone encountered either of these issues of trying to figure out how to name files, or of downloading files with lots of random names that might have a tendency to get lost without them being labeled as they are downloaded?