"awk - see mawk"
What.
Why the name?
71–80 of 101 posts
Re: Why the name?
#72Re: Why the name?
#73The free software movement really needs to step up its name-game. No normal people want to use a program called The GIMP .
They happily fly on an airline named "Virgin". I think GIMP is quite ok – possibly better than the too-literal 'Photoshop'.
Now if GIMP were actually usable...
Re: Why the name?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
GNU is a recursive acronym http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym
I know it is a recursive acronym. I just want to know why they chose G, instead of A, B, C, ... etc.
"Gnu" is a real word in the dictionary.
Edit: On my system it's the only ^.nu$ in the dictionary.
Re: Why the name?
#75So "ruby" is not a play on "perl"? I don't believe it.
Re: Why the name?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
GNU is a recursive acronym http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym
I know it is a recursive acronym. I just want to know why they chose G, instead of A, B, C, ... etc.
Stallman liked GNU because it's unpronounceable. When Europeans first discovered the animal, Africans referred to the first sound in its name as a click, which the Europeans didn't use in their languages, so the "g" in the word essentially stands for "unpronounceable sound," and is usually omitted. He used it for fun but brought back the sound in the form of a hard "g."
Re: Why the name?
#77Great 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.
I was using web servers at the time, and the "a patchy server" story is what everyone said back then. Nowadays people take it all for granted but Apache was radical at the time, previously people had been running httpd out of inetd.conf (!)
Re: Why the name?
#78In 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…
When sed was new, the name wouldn't even have been considered cryptic: everybody already new ed.
Also: before sed there was gres. I'm not saying it's relevant, just that I've thought it would be better to have gres, and have it be the standard, than sed. (Match and substitution in actually-separate arguments.)
Re: Why the name?
#79Another great one is 'dd' which stands for 'Copy and Convert'. Oddly enough, cc was already taken.
Wasn't "dd" always "duplicate data"?
Re: Why the name?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I never had that definition for Gimp. To me it had always meant someone with a minor injury or handicap. Eg "my gimp leg is acting up again"