Opinions on using My as a class name prefix

Question

Personally, I've never liked the MyObject naming of classes. I would guess that the status quo would agree but I'd like to see the other side of the argument and if there's any validity to it.

Answer 1

'My' is already used by me, use something else

Answer 2

I've never seen it done in production code, although I dare say it exists.

It's like the metasyntactic variables "foo" and "bar" - it's usually used as a placeholder for a real name.

So for example, if I know that someone has their own class deriving from Form, but I don't know anything else about it, a code example would use:

public class MyForm : Form

I'd certainly take a firm stance against it for real code though :)

Answer 3

I suppose one instance where it would be close to acceptable is if the class you're prefixing with "My" is an inner class (i.e a private class declared within another class). I'm not sure if there are any naming conventions governing inner classes, but this could be one way to differentiate.

Answer 4

I've used My in 2 situations:

1. Way back when in my first programming classes in school
2. When I am doing basic 'hello world' applications to learn a language

but NEVER in production or even pseudo-production code.

Answer 5

I'd avoid it in production code, your type name should reflect the function its supposed to perform.

I've used it a couple of times when patching/hacking third party code, for instance replacing Controller with MyController to make it clear it is a hack, that should be approached with caution, and a bat.

Answer 6

As far as I've ever seen, My is a prefix used in sample code that indicates "your stuff goes here".

It's kind of like foo. Teaching purposes only.