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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

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Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#161

Post by causalmodels »

jameshart wrote: post #15

> naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. Really? Have you specced a microprocessor lately? Seen what pharmaceuticals are called? How polymer compound materials get named?

Brand name pharmaceuticals are sort of a different thing. Brand names must comply with the naming guidelines of the FDA, European Medicines Agency, and HealthCanda simultaneously. In practice, this makes it tricky to use actual words. So my companies adopt an 'empty vessel' naming approach. The empty vessels are nonsense words that (1) invoke an emotion (wegovy is a good example), (2) can be trademarked, and (3) it can survive brand pressure.

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#162

Post by i_am_proteus »

plorkyeran wrote: post #98

> 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…

So few of us use physical tapes these days, but the "tape archive" (tar) remains ubiquitous.

Not entirely unserious: "awk" is a good name because it is three characters to type "rg" is better than "grep" because it is two fewer characters type

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#163

Post by shaftway »

moregrist wrote: post #147
munificent wrote: post #94

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. This article would certainly disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def... > the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait. Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?". > The Hoover…

> > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable. The author is just wrong. Chemistry is fairly jam-packed with various cutesy names either to amuse the authors or because they’re attempting to make an algorithm memorable to the field. Off the top of my head: - SHAKE and RATTLE: Bond constraint algorithms. - CHARMm: An MD pack…

> > > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

Lawrencium has entered the chat.

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#164

Post by DSMan195276 »

plorkyeran wrote: post #98

> 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…

Yeah this definitely falls into the category of "I use them so they feel natural", there's nothing amazing about those names.

The underlying problem is that you now run into so many named things (utilities, libraries, programs, etc.) in a day and they all have to differentiate themselves somehow. You can't name every crypto library `libcrypto` for obvious reasons.

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#165

Post by accrual »

amelius wrote: post #111
morshu9001 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how they sold that into 2006, with a CRT still

They had to because the RDF was based on CRT technology, originally.

What is RDF in the context of eMacs? I searched but I just get "Resource Description Framework" or "Reality Distortion Field".

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#166

Post by accrual »

pesus wrote: post #29
wpollock wrote: post #13

If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?

I still think of the short-lived Apple eMac when I read it.

Same! I had eMacs in school and loved them, they were my first exposure to the array of characters "emac".

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#167

Post by groos »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #164
plorkyeran wrote: post #98

> 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…

Yeah this definitely falls into the category of "I use them so they feel natural", there's nothing amazing about those names. The underlying problem is that you now run into so many named things (utilities, libraries, programs, etc.) in a day and they all have to differentiate themselves somehow. You can't name every crypto library `libcrypto` for obvious reasons.

Fine. Name it sodium-crypto.a or sodium.crypto.a or whatever. The author's complaint does hold water.

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#168

Post by dylan604 »

moregrist wrote: post #147
munificent wrote: post #94

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. This article would certainly disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def... > the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait. Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?". > The Hoover…

> > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable. The author is just wrong. Chemistry is fairly jam-packed with various cutesy names either to amuse the authors or because they’re attempting to make an algorithm memorable to the field. Off the top of my head: - SHAKE and RATTLE: Bond constraint algorithms. - CHARMm: An MD pack…

Americium, Einsteinium, Unobtanium also show chemistry isn't so uptight as suggested.

Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

#170

Post by throwaway81523 »

> http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr” when someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.

The "Zephyr" that I knew about was a notification system for workstation clusters on a LAN, written at the MIT Athena project. You'd announce something on it, and the info would spread through the network as if by a gentle breeze. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)

I do recall there was an experimental study in the 1980s (Hartwell, Landauer, and Gigliotti iirc) showing that this naming stuff doesn't matter. This exact same debate was going on back then. The study refuted Don Norman's "The Truth about Unix" paper which claimed that Unix commands ("rm", "mv", etc.) were too hard to remember.

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