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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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #149
mojuba wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.

lol no. There are literally a hundred plus Unix tools and commands. I couldn’t tell you what 90% of them mean. I sure as hell couldn’t have told you what sed stood for. And if you asked me tomorrow I also wouldn’t be able to tell you. C programmers are great. I love C. I wish everything had a beautiful pure C API. But C programmers are strictly banned from naming things. Their naming privileges have been revoked, per…

[deleted]

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

#222

Post by accrual »

I'm happy to see this post, it's something that bugs me every time I have to learn a new tool with a name that's neither A. unique to the project AND B. doesn't describe the project.

For example Zola and Hugo, static site generators - great, unique words that has no other meaning to me but the generator. The only other Hugo I know is a character in Bob's Burgers. But choosing random dictionary words like Avocado or Spice or whatever makes it completely transparent against my existing knowledge and now I have the mental lookup issue the author describes.

The other day a HN user was commenting "NAT, aka IP masquerading... (proceeds to keep re-using the term)". IME no one in the industry says "IP masquerading" unless your entire org and vendors are on Linux. Just call it NAT, we know what you mean. This a Linuxism and should be avoided!

Let's hit up Britannica.com on the word:

> a party at which people wear masks and often costumes

> a way of appearing or behaving that is not true or real

> to pretend to be someone or something else

I guess? I guess we are "pretending to be the peer IP when actually we are the LAN IP". But to me it's just nonsense. It's capital T Translating one IP to another for the sake of routing, drop the weird social implications.

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

#223

Post by makeitdouble »

BoppreH wrote: post #124
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…

I think the author makes a hard distinction between consumer products and infrastructure/engineering products. The Shelby Cobra has a funny name, but its engine is the memorably named V8. The Hoover Dam is a dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge. We can argue about namespace pollution and overly long names, but I think there's a point there. When I look at other profession's jargon, I never have the impression…

> The Hoover Dam is a dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge.

Nothing stops the author from using "Libsodium crypto lib" and "Zephyr RTOS".

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

#224

Post by tharkun__ »

chihuahua wrote: post #215
WJW wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once tried this on me during Friday drinks and I successfully conquered the challenge with "tar --help". The challenger tried in vain to claim that this was not valid, but everyone present agreed that an exit code of zero meant that it was a valid solution.

I seem to remember "tar xvf filename.tar" from the 1990s, I'll try that out. If I'm wrong, I'll be dead before I even notice anything. That's better than dying of cancer or Alzheimer's.

    tar zxvf
Is burnt into my brain. One of my earliest Linux command line experience required untaring zipped tars.

So yeah that xkcd is "not funny" to me in that sense. Of course I couldn't tell you pretty much any other use without a man page.

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

#225

Post by layer8 »

benrutter wrote: post #95

> Our field deserves better than a zoo of random nouns masquerading as professional nomenclature. Clarity isn’t boring, it’s respect for your users’ time and cognitive resources. I felt a little guilty at first, I maintain a project called Wimsey (it's a data testing library but you couldn't guess that) and at work my team regularly enjoys fun/silly names. Trying to defend myself, I was thinking about various logical…

Some people are passionate about being professional in the sense of doing things competently and expertly. Cuteness is inherently a mental distraction from what you really care about in the craft, which is why it appears tonally inappropriate. The desire to add some sort of cuteness is taken as an indication that the person apparently doesn’t derive enough joy from the workmanship itself. In other words, a lack of caring about and being fulfilled by the actual work, so that you need to add something “fun” on top.

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

#226

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

ekidd wrote: post #199
pdpi wrote: post #187

GNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of B…

> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. Traditionally, according to folklore? "Delete disk" or "destroy data". (Because it was commonly used to write raw disk blocks.)

Another, similar name it is sometimes jokingly referred to under is “destroyer of disks”.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081206105906/http://www.noah.o...

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

#228

Post by austin-cheney »

The article mentions that things were fine until around 2010 when developers collectively lost their minds. So what’s special about 2010?

It’s about that time that everything needed a website with a domain and all the domains were gobbled up by squatters. Also people were inventing new words looking for the fewest possible syllables for SEO and marketing.

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

#229

Post by rikthevik »

pdpi wrote: post #187

GNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of B…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice_2000 was pretty clear about what it did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX less so.

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

#230

Post by rconti »

dhosek wrote: post #146
patrickmay wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked to have LaTeX installed at one site, several years ago. The first Google results were eye-opening.

I had a student in one of my LaTeX classes back in the 90s who had a “I lust for latex” T-shirt.

Honestly, I'm not sure which interpretation is more concerning.
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