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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

#191

Post by armadsen »

munificent wrote: post #94

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. This article would certainly disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def... > the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait. Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?". > The Hoover…

Biology is another discipline where the author is wrong. See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein

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

#192

Post by gowld »

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…

awk is short for awkward, like awkword, for awkwardly manipulating words (text).

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

#193

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

MerrimanInd wrote: post #142

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. The cognitive load is unavoidable and in some ways worse in industries with highly technical names. At one point in my career I was an engine calibrator at a large automotive OEM. Our lexicon included physics industry terms (BMEP, BTDC, VVT, etc), a large software package where every variable, table, and function was an acronym (we had about 75k t…

In mobile telephony, one of the first things new hires are told is “don’t even try to work out what all the acronyms stand for; it won’t help”. You just have eat all the alphabet soup. Worse is that they nest themselves. You can have acronyms where every letter stands for another acronym. Writing a thousand words without using a single noun is easy. And of course all the short ones are overloaded. Is an AP an Application Processor or an Access Point? Depends on which subfield the person you’re talking to is from.

But they’re a necessary evil, since MSISDN is still less cumbersome than Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number.

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

#194

Post by ohboynotthis »

lr0 wrote: post #39
dietr1ch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> renaming will be much cheaper if you're renaming to descriptive names Idk, renaming things that shipped is a PITA. Say you wanted to rename `fish` to `a-decent-shell`. - Packages in all distros would need to be renamed. - Configuration for all systems using/having fish would need to change. - Scripts would need to change, from the shebang to the contents if necessary. - Users would need to understand that they now…

> Say you wanted to rename `fish` to `a-decent-shell` You just made my argument. Renaming is hard precisely because you shipped with the wrong name. That's why you should get it right from the start. Every cost you listed [distro packages, configs, scripts, docs, domain] exists whether you rename to something descriptive OR another random word. The migration pain is identical. "Fish" → "decent-shell" costs the same a…

[dead]

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

#195

Post by jchw »

Sometimes I am baffled at what gets onto the frontpage at HN, reminding us all that the people who vote stories and the people who comment on them are less of an overlapping group than you might think. I can understand the desire to have names that are more descriptive, but to claim we have "lost the plot" while holding up names like "awk" is contradictory at best. It sounds more like this person just had a personal vendetta against cute sounding names, not against the names being uselessly non-descriptive. In my opinion, the way this post is framed at the outset is misleading.

— This comment brought to you via Firefox, which obviously from its name, is a web browser.

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

#196

Post by dinkleberg »

cranky908canuck wrote: post #182

Yep. Just did a reimage update to Fedora 43, got errors about 'ptyxis' in some shell scripts. Wat (wipes desk and keyboard)? Oh, it's the graphical terminal program (alternative to 'gnome-terminal'). Well, um, ok. However, I will concede, after more digging as to why (as it rankled), that there was a "have to choose a unique name" issue there (even leaving aside trademark issues). I'm resigned (so I suppose signed up…

It’s a solid terminal, but could they have chosen a worse name?

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

#197

Post by gowld »

moregrist wrote: post #147
munificent wrote: post #94

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. This article would certainly disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def... > the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait. Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?". > The Hoover…

> > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable. The author is just wrong. Chemistry is fairly jam-packed with various cutesy names either to amuse the authors or because they’re attempting to make an algorithm memorable to the field. Off the top of my head: - SHAKE and RATTLE: Bond constraint algorithms. - CHARMm: An MD pack…

Most of your examples are software!

Also SHAKE and RATTLE describe the motion-simulation in the algorithm.

Acronyms are abbreviations for meaningful names.

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

#198

Post by anyfoo »

pdpi wrote: post #187

GNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of B…

> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for.

Data(set) Definition. But that name does not make any sense whatsoever by itself in this context, neither for the tool (it hardly "defines" anything), nor for UNIX in general (there are no "datasets" in UNIX).

Instead, it's specifically a reference to the DD statement in the JCL, the job control language, of many of IBM's mainframe operating systems of yore (let's not get into the specifics of which ones, because that's a whole other can of complexity).

And even then the relation between the DD statement and the dd command in UNIX is rather tenuous. To simplify a lot, DD in JCL does something akin to "opening a file", or rather "describing to the system a file that will later be opened". The UNIX tool dd, on the other hand, was designed to be useful for exchanging files/datasets with mainframes. Of course, that's not at all what it is used for today, and possibly that was true even back then.

This also explains dd's weird syntax, which consists of specifying "key=value" or "key=flag1,flag2,..." parameters. That is entirely alien to UNIX, but is how the DD and other JCL (again, of the right kind) statements work.

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

#199

Post by ekidd »

pdpi wrote: post #187

GNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of B…

> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for.

Traditionally, according to folklore? "Delete disk" or "destroy data". (Because it was commonly used to write raw disk blocks.)

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

#200

Post by accrual »

gherkinnn wrote: post #100
bighead1 wrote: post #65

counterpoints: pascal, eiffel, ada, C, APL, dylan

JavaScript

Some interesting commentary:

> InfoWorld: As I understand it, JavaScript started out as Mocha, then became LiveScript and then became JavaScript when Netscape and Sun got together. But it actually has nothing to do with Java or not much to do with it, correct?

> Eich: That’s right. It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript. And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to make it a complementary scripting language to go with Java, with the compiled language.

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