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A made-up name is better than no name

mbuffett.com

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Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#21

Post by kstrauser »

deathanatos wrote: post #16

… a company I once worked at named everything after characters from a certain TV show. Effectively the same as a made up name. Let's just say one of the character's name was … a tough one to pronounce. And it caused endless "what's a … Kep?" type questions. The CTO at some point later on decreed "enough; descriptive names, not made up things" … and the experience was such that I agreed with the decree, and I've sort…

That's why my servers tend to have boring names like "web-23" now. Given them fun names is fun, up until it isn't, and then it's really freaking annoying.

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#22

Post by kstrauser »

Sweepi wrote: post #15
serbuvlad wrote: post #9

If it occurs often enough, yes! The human brain finds unexpected or weird words a lot more memorable than expected words. grep is better than find "find-regular-expression" awk is better than "execute-command-on-regular-expression" perl has nothing to do with pearls If it's a common command, concept, function, etc. that appears in may places, give it an odd name! Document it thoroughly! And don't go overboard. When e…

I regularly cannot remember if its "grep" or "greb". Never had this issue with Windows' "findstr".

It's not "findstring"? I'd never remember that.

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#23

Post by tshaddox »

efitz wrote: post #8

I really don’t like this idea if you are sharing this code base with anyone else. I work in one of the magnificent seven and the culture here is codename crazy. Everything has code names, of course: every project, every release of every project, every component or subservice of every project, every internal tool, and often minor features that address some one-off problem in any of the above. I am sure that these name…

It depends whether the increased brevity is worth the decreased intuitiveness. Consider that all words and names are made up in order to trade intuitiveness for brevity.

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#24

Post by seabass-labrax »

serbuvlad wrote: post #9

If it occurs often enough, yes! The human brain finds unexpected or weird words a lot more memorable than expected words. grep is better than find "find-regular-expression" awk is better than "execute-command-on-regular-expression" perl has nothing to do with pearls If it's a common command, concept, function, etc. that appears in may places, give it an odd name! Document it thoroughly! And don't go overboard. When e…

> grep is better than find "find-regular-expression"

I'm not sure if you are familiar with where grep came from, but in short it is an abbreviation of a command in the original UNIX text editor: g/re/p - g for global command, re standing for your search query and p for print to screen or teletype. In that way, it is nothing more than an anachronism that would have been immediately obvious to anyone working in a UNIX environment at the time.

AWK and Perl are just programming languages. I think they have made up names because programming languages are singular entities, but have too many characteristics to condense into a short name. That's different from a function, which in conventional style does exactly one thing with only one or two characteristics and so can have a 'short' and descriptive name a few words long.

I don't disagree with your argument, but I wanted to point out that the examples you gave were made-up names out of tradition or necessity, not because they were intentionally designed to be memorable.

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#25

Post by david-gpu »

I once worked for a company that decided to eliminate internal codenames and instead use the actual brand names used by our customers. It removed a barrier to communication with no undesirable side effects.

Thank you Tim! You did us a solid.

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#28

Post by boredtofears »

marcusbuffett wrote: post #11
efitz wrote: post #8

I really don’t like this idea if you are sharing this code base with anyone else. I work in one of the magnificent seven and the culture here is codename crazy. Everything has code names, of course: every project, every release of every project, every component or subservice of every project, every internal tool, and often minor features that address some one-off problem in any of the above. I am sure that these name…

Oh god yeah I’ve been in this situation too. Working at Apple it was like “is everyone in this meeting cleared for Tigris?” And you’d be like “I don’t know, what the hell is Tigris”, and then it turns out after you check your clearances it’s just iOS 13, which is obviously no mystery that after 12 there will be a 13. Just call it that! Nothing was named according to what it did either, I think our deploy tool was Car…

I dunno carnival seems like an apt name for a deploy tool at some of my past jobs.

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#29

Post by aragonite »

Instead of "kep", if you want something that visually stands out, there are also lots of fun little symbol-like characters you can use, even when you're dealing with a language where identifiers are limited to ID_Start/ID_Continue (e.g. Javascript, Rust). My favorite collection :)

  ⴵ ⵛ ꘜ ⵣ ꕤ ꖜ 
  ꘖ ꧮ ⴲ Ⰴ Ⰺ

Re: A made-up name is better than no name

#30

Post by diob »

efitz wrote: post #8

I really don’t like this idea if you are sharing this code base with anyone else. I work in one of the magnificent seven and the culture here is codename crazy. Everything has code names, of course: every project, every release of every project, every component or subservice of every project, every internal tool, and often minor features that address some one-off problem in any of the above. I am sure that these name…

It's one of my big issues with lots of things, even outside tech.

What's that? Oh, so it's like this. Why not call it that?

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