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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

#281

Post by sdovan1 »

> The next time you’re about to name your project after your favorite anime character, pause. Ask yourself: “Would a civil engineer name a bridge support system this way?” If the answer is no, choose a better name.

I'm creating a dotfiles to remote SSH session tool in shell. At first, I wanted to call it "sship", but that name was already taken. Something like "ssh-dotfiles-carrier" felt too long for a command, and abbreviating it to "sdc" would lose the meaning.

So yes, I eventually named it "shitt-p" (character of Hitman Reborn!), since I wanted it to relate to "sh"...

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

#282

Post by necovek »

Johanx64 wrote: post #265
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 quinte…

Do you have examples of bad UX in recent Gimp versions that's not simply "no time to improve it" (still mostly volunteer project)?

I believe Gimp could never enter the professional circles because it's internals are too tied to one, single colour model (RGB).

Professionals in many fields use tools with very bad UI/UX.

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

#283

Post by necovek »

Arcuru wrote: post #214
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.

I agree GIMP is a bad name, but is it really a 'solid' competitor to Photoshop? My impression has been that it was never close to being competitive on features. I've only used either of them very briefly so I may be wildly wrong though.

IIRC, it was too expensive to make Gimp support non-RGB color spaces needed for professional image editing.

I use it semi-regularly and it does a great job for me, and most of UX is clear and obvious (high DPI support is lacking). But I haven't used Photoshop since the 90s (or Aldus PhotoStyler before it was acquired by Adobe ;)).

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

#284

Post by [deleted] »

anyfoo wrote: post #198
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. 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…

[deleted]

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

#285

Post by longemen3000 »

That is one thing i like about the Julia package ecosystem. The general Registry (where package metadata is stored and where you go to register a new package), recommends using explicit names over short acronyms. For example, DifferentialEquations.jl is a package that does differential equations in julia (recognizable via the .jl suffix). What does Garlic.jl do? Exactly, garlic (the vegetable) modelling.

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

#286

Post by lanstin »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #277
groos wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can, but then the names get needlessly long and one of the things we generally like (especially for command-line programs) is names that are short and easy to type. If we're going to make this argument then why not call the unix tools `concatenate`, `difference`, `stream-editor`, etc. Those are way better names in terms of telling you what they do, but from a usability standpoint they stink to type out. Libraries…

libeay

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

#287

Post by necovek »

hyperpape wrote: post #93
lr0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to know what Ingres is. "PostgreSQL" still tells you it's SQL-related, which is infinitely more than "fluffnutz" tells you. And once you learn it's a database, the name reinforces that knowledge forever. Good luck remembering what "fluffnutz" does in 6 months.

That's a really nice mnemonic. I wish I lived in an alternate universe where Postgres was called PostgreSQL so that it was easier to remember. Perhaps if we start using that, it will take over, like how everyone calls the Go project Golang.

When Google introduced the Go language, it was impossible to google for any content related to it. So community quickly pivoted to always saying golang ;)

(At least that's how I remember it as I was "why name a language like that when you know it won't be searchable")

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

#288

Post by lanstin »

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…

creat(...)

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

#289

Post by zahlman »

parpfish wrote: post #235
kixiQu wrote: post #97

I believe strongly in this counterargument: https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam... Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so projects will evolve such that they are not accurately descriptive after time. (Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Servic…

I’ve been told multiple times in multiple jobs that I’m good at naming things, and I love whimsical names. A couple rules I’ve internalized are: - if it’s hard to name, that’s a good sign that you haven’t clearly delineated use case or set of responsibilities for the thing - best case for a name is that it’s weird and whimsical on first encounter. Then when somebody tells you the meaning/backstory for the name it rev…

> I’ve been told multiple times in multiple jobs that I’m good at naming things, and I love whimsical names.

As long as you're naming products and features, rather than variables.

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

#290

Post by necovek »

tuveson wrote: post #115
scoopdewoop wrote: post #72

> programming shifted from corporate mainframe work to the community builders > which is good but then: > Our field deserves better than a zoo of random nouns masquerading as professional nomenclature Okay? So is this professional nomenclature or the work of community builders? I think: everyone should code, it should not be an elitist profession, we don't need to all accommodate busy professionals, i'm fine with cor…

It’s all fun and games until you have to be like “blastoise deleted our database backups”

Well if they used coq, maybe it would not have happened!
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