Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
"And off by one errors"
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
251–260 of 563 posts
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#252Ok man, now give me a moment, I need to administer my weightloss weekly injection of
L-Histidyl-2-methylalanyl-L-alpha-glutamylglycyl-L-threonyl-L-phenylalanyl-L-threonyl-L-seryl-L-alpha-aspartyl-L-valyl-L-seryl-L-seryl-L-tyrosyl-L-leucyl-L-alpha-glutamylglycyl-L-glutaminyl-L-alanyl-L-alanyl-N6-(N-(17-carboxy-1-oxoheptadecyl)-L-gamma-glutamyl-2-(2-(2-aminoethoxy)ethoxy)acetyl-2-(2-(2-aminoethoxy)ethoxy)acetyl)-L-lysyl-L-alpha-glutamyl-L-phenylalanyl-L-isoleucyl-L-alanyl-L-tryptophyl-L-leucyl-L-valyl-L-arginylglycyl-L-arginylglycine
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#253GNU'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…
GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix".
Yacc stands for "Yet Another C Compiler".
Nano was originally TIP which stood for "TIP Isn't Pico" but was later changed to Nano so as not to conflict with another Unix utility called tip [0]. Presumably nano was chosen as the metric prefix next larger than pico.
Personally, I'd prefer choosing a random string of 3-8 letters for command line tools. At least that would be better than naming programs using generic names (Keep, Bamboo, Chef, Salt) which leads to all sorts of name collisions.
From the article:
> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.
The mascot for an $8.8T dollar (supply side) software industry, larger than Google, Microsoft and Apple combined, is a cartoon penguin [1].
"never had it in the first place" is absolutely correct.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_nano
[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#254GNU'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.
It looks like X was deliberately chosen to denote succession of W, not clashing with it:
"The name X derives from the lineage of the system. At Stanford University, Paul Asente and Brian Reid had begun work on the W window system [3] as an alternative to VGTS [13, 221 for the V system [5]. [...] We acquired a UNIX-based version of W for the VSlOO (with synchronous communication over TCP[24] produced by Asente and Chris Kent at Digital’s Western Research Laboratory. [...] It was also clear that, although synchronous communication was perhaps acceptable in the V system (owing to very fast networking primitives), it was completely inadequate in most other operating environments. X is our “reaction” to W."Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#255GNU'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…
Having come from the DOS world (or it could have been Norton utilities), I always thought it was more like DiskDupe (duplicate disks).
Funny how we never confirm our hypothesis that "checks out".
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#256GNU'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…
GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". Yacc stands for "Yet Another C Compiler". Nano was originally TIP which stood for "TIP Isn't Pico" but was later changed to Nano so as not to conflict with another Unix utility called tip [0]. Presumably nano was chosen as the metric prefix next larger than pico. Personally, I'd prefer choosing a random string of 3-8 letters for command line tools. At least that would be better than n…
Yacc is Yet Another Compiler Compiler, not Yet Another C Compiler. It's useful for writing compilers, not for compiling C.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#257I remember a trend of randomly dropping vowels started with flickr.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#258GNU'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…
Even GNU is a recursive acronym, Emacs a convoluted one... What's Perl, Python, Java... all about? Remember how JavaScript was named? Don't mention Go (go-lang) or Pascal... Git, Mercurial, CVS anyone?
I believe this makes much ado about nothing.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#259I think if a project name is easily googleable, it's a good name. If I see "generic-tool-name failed" in the logs and can't immediately find what that thing even is, because I get lots of irrelevant search results, it's a bad name. This can happen with both descriptive and cutesy names.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#260>“Descriptive names are boring!”
>>Yes, and surgical instruments are boring.
I'm absolutely certain that this person has never been (awake) in a surgery suite because all of the tools people use have eponymous names.
There are a billion little grabbers that all have silly names like Adson, Allis, Babcock, Kocher etc. which are all meaningless until you just know what they are. And don't you grab the Mayo scissors when they ask for Metzenbaum. In med school we had a flashcard deck that just had a picture of the tool and what it is called on the other end.
In the end, I think the author has a point, but then doesn't really make it that well. I think using awk as a good example is a bit silly. diff is a good one though!