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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

#261

Post by anyfoo »

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.

I still do that at least once a week. Along with "tar xzpvf" or more complex invocations like:

    tar cvf - -C /foo/bar baz | zstd > foo.tar.zstd

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

#262

Post by dillydogg »

bitwize wrote: post #154

> Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering, where people there maintain even stricter discipline. IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. 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. Ummmmm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_compounds_wit... "Yo…

The Drosophila people had the best naming schemes. I really wish we kept up the whimsy of gene names. One I enjoy is RING; "really interesting new gene". I have always said if I find a gene of interest, I'd call it RUNG.

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

#263

Post by anyfoo »

necovek wrote: post #255
anyfoo wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. Data(set) Definition. But that name does not make any sense whatsoever by itself in this context, neither for the tool (it hardly "defines" anything), nor for UNIX in general (there are no "datasets" in UNIX). Instead, it's specifically a reference to the DD statement in the JCL, the job control language, of many of IBM's mainframe operating systems of yore…

Having come from the DOS world (or it could have been Norton utilities), I always thought it was more like DiskDupe (duplicate disks). Funny how we never confirm our hypothesis that "checks out".

"disk dump" is another common (but wrong) guess.

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

#264

Post by postalcoder »

> There’s an odd tendency in modern software development; we’ve collectively decided that 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.

I worked in finance – we gave our models names that endeared us to them. My favorite is a coworker naming his model "beefhammer".

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

#265

Post by Johanx64 »

jrm4 wrote: post #201

I'll die on the proverbial hill that the absolute worst instance of this has always been GIMP, which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago. It was and perhaps still is, a solid competitor to Photoshop, but any unfamiliar grownup is, quite reasonably, going to never ever ever trust anything to do serious work with a name like that.

GIMP has god horrid UX, there's no way it could have eaten Adobes anything. There's lineage of FOSS apps that stick by the "we're not X, we're different from X." mantra.

The discomfort, frustration and unintuitiveness you're feeling from using our app? It's just you!

No, that's not bad design and bad UX! its simply because we are different! We aren't X (Photoshop), we just do things differently here!".

GIMP is quintessential example of this.

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

#266

Post by mvanzoest »

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…

yeah like how about the "sonic hedgehog" protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein

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

#267

Post by abetusk »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #256
abetusk wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". Yacc stands for "Yet Another C Compiler". Nano was originally TIP which stood for "TIP Isn't Pico" but was later changed to Nano so as not to conflict with another Unix utility called tip [0]. Presumably nano was chosen as the metric prefix next larger than pico. Personally, I'd prefer choosing a random string of 3-8 letters for command line tools. At least that would be better than n…

Yacc is Yet Another Compiler Compiler, not Yet Another C Compiler. It's useful for writing compilers, not for compiling C.

Yep, my mistake! And it makes a lot more sense.

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

#268

Post by hiccuphippo »

goopypoop wrote: post #231
layer8 wrote: post #216

I agree with the sentiment, though the argument could be made better. It’s not really about good names being descriptive, nor about memorable mnemonics. It’s that modern naming styles tend to overload random English words for no good reason, but just to be cute (which I don’t consider a good reason) or to be evocative of something which it isn’t. One issue with that is that you might have very different connotations…

it's kafkaesque

Is Kafka (as in Apache Kafka) a good name?

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

#269

Post by softskunk »

anyfoo wrote: post #263
necovek wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having come from the DOS world (or it could have been Norton utilities), I always thought it was more like DiskDupe (duplicate disks). Funny how we never confirm our hypothesis that "checks out".

"disk dump" is another common (but wrong) guess.

I always read it as “[disk|data] destroyer”, because that’s what it’ll do if you’re not careful.

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

#270

Post by necovek »

bigiain wrote: post #106
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.

Same for grep - with, I guess, the proviso/assumption that you know what regular expression means, which might have been a fair assumption for the sort of people who had command line access to Unix systems in the 70s/80s, but may no longer be valid for developers under 30 who grew up with Windows and were perhaps trained in 6 or 26 week "bootcamps" that didn't have time to cover historical basics like that?

Regular expressions are more of a CS topic (regular languages), though common abbrevs of "re" and "regex" I've only seen in the wild pre and post my formal education in CS.
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