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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

#101

Post by debazel »

lr0 wrote: post #70
gipp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but how many LLM streaming clients are out there? Namespacing, sure. But is "We use gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client to talk to the backend" (x50 similarly cumbersome names in any architecture discussion) really better than "We use Pegasus as our LLM streaming client"?

Nobody says "gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client" in conversation. You say "the streaming client" or "llm-stream" the same way you'd say "Pegasus." But when someone new joins or you're reading code, "llm-stream" is self-documenting. "Pegasus" requires looking it up every single time until you memorize an arbitrary mapping.

This sounds awful, now you'll be reading some documentation or comment about llm-stream where they didn't mention the full namespace, so you have no idea which of the 50 different llm-stream tools they're talking about, and on top of that you can't even search for it online.

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

#102

Post by mojuba »

plorkyeran wrote: post #98

> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations. If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance…

However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.

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

#103

Post by gherkinnn »

This reads like an extensive, and frankly exhausting, rationalisation of a personal preference. Personal preferences are fine, I have my own. But please stop thinking they apply universally.

Laravel works better than Rails-but-PHP. Ruby on Rails beats Opinionated-One-Person-Stack-Using-Ruby and I'm fine with the name Ruby as well.

I shall name my next product larmn in honour of OP.

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

#104

Post by patrickmay »

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.

I asked to have LaTeX installed at one site, several years ago. The first Google results were eye-opening.

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

#105

Post by jolmg »

mojuba wrote: post #102
plorkyeran wrote: post #98

> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations. If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance…

However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.

That's part of the point, I believe. It's not about being always able to guess the function from first sight. It's also about the function and name serving as mnemonic to each other once you understand how it got named.

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

#106

Post by bigiain »

mojuba wrote: post #102
plorkyeran wrote: post #98

> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations. If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance…

However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.

Same for grep - with, I guess, the proviso/assumption that you know what regular expression means, which might have been a fair assumption for the sort of people who had command line access to Unix systems in the 70s/80s, but may no longer be valid for developers under 30 who grew up with Windows and were perhaps trained in 6 or 26 week "bootcamps" that didn't have time to cover historical basics like that?

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

#107

Post by lr0 »

hyperpape wrote: post #93
lr0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to know what Ingres is. "PostgreSQL" still tells you it's SQL-related, which is infinitely more than "fluffnutz" tells you. And once you learn it's a database, the name reinforces that knowledge forever. Good luck remembering what "fluffnutz" does in 6 months.

That's a really nice mnemonic. I wish I lived in an alternate universe where Postgres was called PostgreSQL so that it was easier to remember. Perhaps if we start using that, it will take over, like how everyone calls the Go project Golang.

https://www.postgresql.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL

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

#109

Post by jasondigitized »

Descriptive names are great until the thing you built starts evolving and doing more or less than the description and then is way more confusing that calling something somewhat general like my favorite of all time: 'Conformity Beaver'. The same goes for teams. Mythical creatures are good because they are fun and also allow the team to evolve its mandate and custodianship and may also help with Conways Law.

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

#110

Post by KingLancelot »

plorkyeran wrote: post #98

> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations. If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance…

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