How do conference-room names fare in this view? My current company names them after football teams or local landmarks. But I heard about someone who used to work somewhere that named theirs after WWII battles, which was awkward for the Japanese guy they interviewed in one of them.
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
241–250 of 563 posts
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#242GNU'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…
Naming is a big part of programming, you'd expect software to have good descriptive names.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#243I believe strongly in this counterargument: https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam... Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so projects will evolve such that they are not accurately descriptive after time. (Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Servic…
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Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#244> 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.
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Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#245GNU'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…
Naming is a big part of programming, you'd expect software to have good descriptive names.
How do you discriminate between 2 different things that ostensibly have similar features, but do it in different ways without getting very large names? What if you modify software or just part of it to make it something distinctively new, should it keep the name or add to it? What if I revert that non-trivial feature and add a different non-trivial one. Now what is it?
I would hope the author realizes the core counterpoint when re-reading "We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue" - because the real names, are the roles the tools play. The implementation name is incidental and amorphous, since you can make wild changes to software, rendering the name without much utility beyond a project label. Project labels are necessarily opaque, for the same good reasons software is. The ideals are more important than the details. They are a conflux of interests and plans, not a market label. If market labels were fixed to functionality, the world would be worse off for obvious reasons of practicality and marketability. Ironically, Stallman is completely comfortable with PostgreSQL which is semantic context adjacent, charitably. It describes a small element of the project (a synthetic SQL syntax), not the project itself.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#246> 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…
It also seems wrong? libsodium explains the logic in its name right on its about page. It's a fork of NaCL (the chemical formula for sodium salt), which itself is a plain acronym for "networking and cryptography library." Google doesn't seem like a good example, either. Wasn't that meant to be an allusion to the very large number googolplex, as in Google exists to tame the unfathomably large amount of information on…
it should have been called chlorine for "Cl" is the cryptography library in "NaCL"
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#247First it was racehorses. Then it was prescription medications. Then software. I hope this goes no further.
The craft beer names though.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#248GNU'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…
In the same vein, my recollection is reading that the X windowing system is called X because it's the letter after "W", which was the original choice (because it's what the word "window" starts with), but it was already taken, so they went with X.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#249GNU'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…
Naming is a big part of programming, you'd expect software to have good descriptive names.
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."