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Why the name?

wiki.debian.org

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Re: Why the name?

#81

Post by jebblue »

phamilton wrote: post #80
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"'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"

That's what it always meant to me, never knew it had any other meaning.

Re: Why the name?

#83

Post by krick »

> Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition

God, this is so true! I seriously think that world would be much better already if we would just rename many of well-established binaries and C-functions to more-intuitive, better convention. Even without changing APIs that much (which would be great too, of course).

Re: Why the name?

#84

Post by EdiX »

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.

Looking it up on Merriam Webster the S&M definition isn't even there I wonder how much that is actually used amongst "normal people".

Re: Why the name?

#85

Post by cogburnd02 »

Pxtl wrote: post #16
AndyKelley wrote: post #12

missing from the list is one I've always wondered about: bamfdaemon

I assume bamf refers to x-men comics where "bamf" was the onomatopoeia for the demonic character Nightcrawler's teleportation.

Offtopic:

(1.) As someone who has only seen the movies, does Azazel (First Class) do "Bamf!" in the comics, too?

(2.) He's Nightcrawler's dad, right? (WP claims so)

Re: Why the name?

#86

Post by anyfoo »

cardamomo wrote: post #2

The etymology of Unix programs: very interesting! The writers of this page also have a sense of humor: > bc > originally a front-end for dc ("desk-calculator"); modern GNU bc is instead a backwards-compatible byte-code interpreter for dc, but what it stands for is still "basic calculator"

While a lot of the names have humorous origins, I don't see the humor in this particular entry at all? Can you explain?

Re: Why the name?

#87

Post by anyfoo »

wantab wrote: post #61

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…

In most cases, it's not cryptic or strange at all and makes perfect sense.

Just because it made sense and was entirely justified right then, does not mean that it is not cryptic or strange today. That's kind of the point of the explanations: to explain why the names are so cryptic and strange.

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.

Interesting expectation. I think why I always wondered, I did not really ask that often. Firstly because when I started, there were not many places to ask for (hardly any non-students even had Internet access), second because it would get tedious after a short time.

It's entirely justified for even very serious "computer persons" to have used these commands all the time and only now learning the meaning of some of them.

Re: Why the name?

#88

Post by wantab »

anyfoo wrote: post #87
wantab wrote: post #61

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…

In most cases, it's not cryptic or strange at all and makes perfect sense. Just because it made sense and was entirely justified right then, does not mean that it is not cryptic or strange today. That's kind of the point of the explanations: to explain why the names are so cryptic and strange. 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 interes…

It makes sense today and isn't cryptic at all. Perhaps to outsiders it is but we're not outsiders. We know it stands for something and "stream editor" should make sense. Looking it up is a matter of "man sed" or, in my case long ago, I'd turn to the guy sitting next to me and ask him.

Yes, awk is an exception, and there are others, but they aren't the rule.

Re: Why the name?

#89

Post by cbd1984 »

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…

The original plan, as I recall, was to move everyone to the Parrot VM, such that there would be a Perl 5 compiler, a Perl 6 compiler, a your-language-here compiler, and everyone would be able to share code in an environment that was similar to the JVM but friendlier to dynamic languages.

So Perl 5 was never going to go away like Perl 4 had, it was just going to become one element of a broader ecosystem.

Re: Why the name?

#90

Post by cbd1984 »

krick wrote: post #83

> Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition God, this is so true! I seriously think that world would be much better already if we would just rename many of well-established binaries and C-functions to more-intuitive, better convention. Even without changing APIs that much (which would be great too, of course).

Good luck with that. We can't even give the creat() system call an 'e' at the end.

(Not that it should be used much these days; the 'creat() then open()' idiom is a race condition waiting to happen, so 'open()' has grown the ability to create-and-open in one atomic operation. That seems to handle most of the file creation that Unix programs need to do.)

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