Thoughts? It does feel like there's a lot of things you can do in comments that would be impossible or impractical to do in names alone, even outside of using comments as documentation. There's certainly much more information that you can comfortably fit into a comment compared to a name.
One of the comments in the Lobste.rs post that I got this from stuck out to me in particular:
Funny story: the other day I found an old zip among my backups that contained the source code of game that I wrote 23 years ago. I was just learning to code at the time. For some reason that I forgot, I decided to comment almost every single line of that game. There are comments everywhere, even for the most obvious things. Later on, I learned that an excess of comments is actually not considered a good practice. I learned that comments might be a code smell indicating that the code is not very clear. Good code should be so clear, that it doesn’t need comments. So I started to do my best to write clear code and I mostly stopped writing comments. Doing so only for the very few parts that were cryptic or hacky or had a very weird reason for being there.
But then I found this old code full of comments. And I thought it was wonderful. It was so easy to read, so easy to understand. Then I contrasted this with my current hobby project, which I write on an off. I had abandoned it for quite some months and I was struggling to understand my own code. I’ve done my best to write clear code, but I wish I had written more comments.
And this is even worse at work, where I have to spend a ton of time reading code that others wrote. I’m sure the authors did their best to write clear code, but I often find myself scratching my head. I cherish the moment when I find some piece of code with comments explaining things. Why they did certain things, how their high level algorithm works, what does this variable do, why I’m not supposed to make that change that looks like it will simplify things but it will break a corner case.
So, I’m starting to think that this idea that comments are not such a good practice is actually quite bad. I don’t think I can remember ever reading some code and thinking “argh so many comments! so noisy” But, on the other hand, I do find myself often in the situation where I don’t understand things and I wish there were some more comments. Now I’m trying to write comments more liberally, and I think you should do the same.
I guess that’s a generalization of the op’s idea.
My rule of thumb is, use short names if the context makes it clear. But do not make names too long and complicated (especially with Python :D). For me having unique names is also important, so I don't get confused. So not only too similar names are bad, especially if they all start like "path_aaa", "path_bbb" and such, then the eye can't distinguish them quickly and clearly. And searching (and maybe replace) without an IDE is easier with unique and descriptive names.
Sometimes its better to come up with a new name, instead adding a modification and make the name longer. This could be in a for loop, where inner loops edit variables and create a variation of it. Instead adding something like "_modified", try to find what the modification is and change from "date" to "now" instead "date_current".