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Why the name?

wiki.debian.org

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Re: Why the name?

#61

Post by wantab »

In most cases, it's not cryptic or strange at all and makes perfect sense. This article ignores history. Back then, names were shortened to save every available byte cause ram and disk usage was so limited. It was also easier to type when you did everything from the command line. In addition, a lot of these were created in some lab somewhere, like Bell Labs, and they had no intention of you using it.

Long ago, when I heard of awk and sed, the first thing I did was ask what they stood for. I would think any seriously interested computer person would do the same thing.

Re: Why the name?

#63

Post by rat87 »

xorcist wrote: post #49
frik wrote: post #36

parrot (common virtual machine for dynamic languages) named after an April Fool's hoax that came true: http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm What a coincident. In 2015, Perl 6 (Parrot VM) and Python 3 have difficulties to transfer their community over from the former major releases Perl 5 and Python 2. Offtopic: We can learn from it. Like fixing a language early or never/only in small steps. Other examples: X…

Perl 6's biggest mistake was naming their language Perl. It turns out Perl-6 is a completely different language from Perl-5, although they share the surrounding ecosystem. But now that the name is taken, Perl-5 is up to version 20.2 with no clear solution in sight to communicate version numbers in the future. I don't think any of the Perl-6 developers actually advocates switching from Perl-5. (But please correct me i…

From what I've heard of it I'm guessing they would be advocating switching to Perl-6 for new projects if perl-6 had actually shipped a 1.0/6.0 type release and seemed to be succeeding as a practical language.

Re: Why the name?

#64

Post by eroncanc »

cbd1984 wrote: post #47
thirteenfingers wrote: post #4

Great fun. One minor nitpick - the story of "Apache Server" being originally derived from "A Patchy Server" is a long-standing myth; the name was originally intended to be a tribute to the Apache Native American peoples. The Wikipedia article on Apache ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server ) includes a link to an interview with Brian Behlendorf ( http://www.linux-mag.com/id/472/ ) where he explains how th…

http://web.archive.org/web/19970415054031/www.apache.org/inf... > The Apache group was formed around a number of people who provided patch files that had been written for NCSA httpd 1.3. The result after combining them was A PAtCHy server. (April 1997) The new story is not consistent with what their website was saying not very long ago.

For what it's worth, that description was on the site from Oct 1996 [1] to Aug 2001 [2].

1.http://web.archive.org/web/19961028123412/http://www.apache.... 2.http://web.archive.org/web/20010803130101/http://www.apache....

Re: Why the name?

#65

Post by TeMPOraL »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #50
vacri wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPad was mocked for sounding like a feminine hygeine product, yet it seems to have done alright for itself.

The difference is that normal people understand the meaning behind the name 'iPad' (Apple's use of 'i' prefix for mobile, the device is like a 'pad' of paper) whilst, to them, Gimp is just a bit ... weird and creepy.

Like they understand the meaning behind Microsoft Excel. Names are names, arbitrary tokens. People get used to them.

Re: Why the name?

#68

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #65
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that normal people understand the meaning behind the name 'iPad' (Apple's use of 'i' prefix for mobile, the device is like a 'pad' of paper) whilst, to them, Gimp is just a bit ... weird and creepy.

Like they understand the meaning behind Microsoft Excel. Names are names, arbitrary tokens. People get used to them.

"'Excel' means to be good at something. A 'gimp' is some weird sexual bondage thing" - this is how most people in the real world think and, whether or not they might get used to names over time and disassociate them from their original meaning, it doesn't change their first impression.

Re: Why the name?

#69

Post by Intermernet »

peteretep wrote: post #30
M2Ys4U wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the two hard problems in Computer Science: 1. Naming things 2. Cache invalidation 3. Off-by-one errors.

Actually th4. Concurrencyere are three - you missed:

4: Concurrenc4: Conc4u:r ryConenccuyrrencyy

    #include 
    
    cpu_set_t  mask;
    CPU_ZERO(&mask);
    CPU_SET(0, &mask);
    result = sched_setaffinity(0, sizeof(mask), &mask);
4: Concurrency
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