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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

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Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#81

Post by jolmg »

wat10000 wrote: post #57
jolmg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A butterfly valve is a category of thing. The corresponding word for emacs would be "editor." That is entirely descriptive: an editor edits. 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.

Someone was probably the first to call their valve a butterfly valve.

Emacs can also be taken to be a category of editors. There are multiple emacs-derived editors.

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#82

Post by ux266478 »

> Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product.

I'm not sure how the author came to this conclusion.

At any rate, programmers aren't any worse about this than mathematicians. Just replace [fictional name] with some foreign word or philosophical term that's justified with the most insane mental gymnastics you've ever heard of. Given some historical native speaker of Latin, do you think they're going to know what a matrix is for? No, because the word means "uterus". There is no connection to "tabular shorthand of linear transformations."

I think it's clear the author is writing this to vent frustration, but I think they've misidentified the actual problem:

> http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr” when someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.

My jaw hit the floor reading this. The idea there are people out there debugging codebases without knowing something as foundational as the dependencies is beyond absurd to me. That's insane and horrifying, overshadowing pretty much the entire blog post. Does anyone else live like this? How do you tolerate these conditions? Why would you tolerate these conditions?

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#83

Post by 9rx »

rkomorn wrote: post #60
9rx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm conflicted because you're not entirely wrong (that it's not just the software industry), but the name is because the combine combines steps that used to be separate. It's not actually badly named.

> I'm conflicted

That's why I chose that specific example! What fun would there be in you not having to think about it?

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#85

Post by Izkata »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #28
wpollock wrote: post #13

If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?

An emergency bootable/rescue tool for Macs!

"Mac OS through email" was what popped into my mind. No idea how that would work.

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#86

Post by Izkata »

rini17 wrote: post #2

That glorious day when I explained to my boss what wiki is and that we should have one internally, he fired "viki" into google, with smoothly honed muscle memory clicked first result..and got full screen of poon.

When I told a co-worker about https://pypi.org/project/voluptuous/ he immediately searched for the name alone, got really wide-eyed and closed the tab, then told us not to do the same.

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#87

Post by bigstrat2003 »

9rx wrote: post #51
wpollock wrote: post #13

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.

Technically it's a "combine harvester" as far as I know, which is more intuitive. Though in practice everyone calls it a "combine".

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#89

Post by ElevenLathe »

arscan wrote: post #46

> “But memorable names help with marketing!” > Sure, if you’re building a consumer product. Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product. The people who will ever care about it just want to know what it does. —— It sounds like the author doesn’t view themselves as a consumer in this relationship, that they are immune to marketing, and that what they are advocating for isn’t just an…

I agree. I've worked in places that discourage "cute" names and the result is often things like having to decide between using CoreMainHttp and MainHttpCore. Or worse, two things with exactly the same name, but two different APIs, with projects sometimes taking both as a dependency at the same time. Or even obsolete parts of the org chart encoded into dependency names, like "DataOrgUtils" when the "Data Org" stopped existing several reorgs ago, when our current VP was an intern and nobody else even worked here.

Without some central control of names though, even "cute" ones tend to converge on the same handful eventually: Phoenix (and other classical allusions like Plato's Cave, etc.), Keymaster/MCP (and other 80s childrens' movie references), Simpsons characters, Star {Trek,Wars} references. These are all attractors for the kind of people that tend to be in IT/SWE even if the actual namespace (all possible ASCII-expressable words) is much larger.

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#90

Post by [deleted] »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #87
9rx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically it's a "combine harvester" as far as I know, which is more intuitive. Though in practice everyone calls it a "combine".

[deleted]
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