51–60 of 563 posts
If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?
Combine things? Nope. Its purpose is to separate things...
Its not just the software industry.
Krazam has excellently parodied this unserious naming indulgence of programmers[1]. "See, Bingo knows everyone's name-O. So we get the user ID from there." Racoon, Wingman, EKS (Entropy Chaos Service), RGS, Barbie Doll, Ringo-2.
are you guys naming your products? We have an internal name and our product name. Internal names start as something that describes the project/repo/tool. Then within 18 months the name no longer makes sense so we rename it to some random name - state names, lake names, presidents, mountains, etc. It's just a placeholder. The public facing product name is a compromise of marketing, trademark, and what gets approved by…
Well so in the beginning we only supported email notifications which is why it's called EmailServ but over time it grew into a robust and pretty general queueing service so now it handles all our background task processing. Sending emails is actually handled by EmailWorker but EmailServ still supports its original API which now uses EmailWorker behind the scenes if you prefer that.
> naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. Really? Have you specced a microprocessor lately? Seen what pharmaceuticals are called? How polymer compound materials get named?
The "Raptor Lake" codename in microprocessors is internal, the product ships with systematic designation. Engineers spec chips by model numbers that encode generation, tier, and performance class. In Pharmaceuticals, Doctors prescribe "sildenafil," not "Viagra." The generic name describes chemical structure. Brand names are marketing for consumers, not professional nomenclature. Mythology in chemistry/astronomy has c…
But in any case, this isn't the real travesty with these names. It's that they're reusing existing common words. The article hates on "google" when actually it's a fantastic name - if you googled it when it was introduced, all the results were about what you wanted. By comparison, Alphabet is an awful name, because if you search for Alphabet only a tiny subset of the results are going to be useful to you.
>Reserve the creative names for end-user products where branding matters. For infrastructure, tools, and libraries, choose clarity. Every time.
Ah yes the software I am giving away for free must go easy on the minds of the poor VCs and business drones who are extracting value from it.
If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?
It's still to his point: > Even when engineers get creative, there’s logic: a butterfly valve actually looks like butterfly wings. You can tell how the name relates to what it actually defines, and how it can be memorable. Editor MACroS still has a logic. It isn't just random.
Picking a specific butterfly valve randomly from an internet search, I find one called the FNW FNWHPA1LSTG24.
Product types and categories get generic names, specific products often get weird names. It's true in just about every field.
What is it with a number of blogs recently that have turned off normal right-click behavior, and probably related, the scroll behavior is awful. This is one, and as soon as I scroll on my work high powered Macbook and it's not smooth, I'm out.
If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?
If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called a "combine" does? Combine things? Nope. Its purpose is to separate things... Its not just the software industry.
It's not actually badly named.