131–140 of 563 posts
Wait till you work in a corporate environment, where Project Fuzzy Mustard triggered a violation of the ElastoFish metric in the Yellow Hills subsystem, leading to a Code Mild Lavender with a side of Pink Sprinkles.
> Every obscure name is a transaction cost levied on every developer who encounters it.
It’s not a mental burden, it’s a cognitive tax. Moreover it’s a transaction cost? Levied on people? Which loads their RAM?
Where’s the simple everyday English?
> 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…
> 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.
I feel like this is approximately the third time I'm learning this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.
That's part of the point, I believe. It's not about being always able to guess the function from first sight. It's also about the function and name serving as mnemonic to each other once you understand how it got named.
Unfortunately this article misses the worst failure of naming: name collisions.
> The cognitive tax > Every obscure name is a transaction cost levied on every developer who encounters it. It’s not a mental burden, it’s a cognitive tax. Moreover it’s a transaction cost? Levied on people? Which loads their RAM? Where’s the simple everyday English?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's part of the point, I believe. It's not about being always able to guess the function from first sight. It's also about the function and name serving as mnemonic to each other once you understand how it got named.
I think perhaps the articles argument gets less strong then? It's claimed grep is "well named" because even though it's not obvious when you first read it, that it being a contraction for "global reg ex print" and hence memorable. I'm not sure the same argument can't be made for libsodium which assuming the reader is familiar with NaCl (the same as the assumption that the previous reader is familiar with regex) then…
The argument goes stronger with projects where the creator seemed to just roll the dice with the name.
> 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…
grep almost has an onomatopoeic nature to it… like, it sounds like you are grabbing or ripping the patterns out of the file, right?