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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

lr0.org

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

#311

Post by bruce511 »

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…

The article even refers to AWK as being the initials of the authors. And posits this as "reasonable"?

Naming is hard, not least because "a million" new projects are spawned every day. And if you're going down a path of "rule the world" (even in a niche like infrastructure) you start by getting a .com domain, so choices are limited.

Plus the name has to be unique enough to Google.

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

#312

Post by bigiain »

necovek wrote: post #270
bigiain wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I'd totally expect CS grads, old school Unix sysadmins, and Perl hackers to be fully familiar with Regex. Not so sure I'd expect that from bootcamp front end webdev "grads", self touch game devs, or maybe (I'm not sure?) engineers who have spent their careers in Microsoft dev environments.

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

#313

Post by selcuka »

HPsquared wrote: post #242
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…

Naming is a big part of programming, you'd expect software to have good descriptive names.

> you'd expect software to have good descriptive names

Like Microsoft Word?

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

#314

Post by salomon812 »

I almost completely disagree with this post. The only thing I can consider that you should probably avoid embarrassing names.

A descriptive name is terrible if you're slightly off. Or if the library gets repurposed. Or if the project doesn't turn out how you expected but it's still helpful. With everything going on, a nonsense name forces people to learn about it instead of having them guess at it from a three word description that might be misleading.

The author probably never had a project where something got named the oscilloscope-controller but there's no oscilloscope in sight, but we used to have one and then we tweaked a few things and now it runs something else and but the name was everywhere.

And all of these are abstract concepts. Getting data from point A to point B. FIFO? It's an acronym. Pipe? Doesn't really suggest it can buffer data. Buffer? Queue? Both sound like they might slow down data. Precise technical names would be good, but then the chances the purpose changes goes up!

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

#315

Post by marc_abonce »

wredcoll wrote: post #160
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…

Naming your library "data-testing-library" would be useful... until there's a second one at which point the specific name effectively becomes meaningless.

Case in point: @testing-library (the JS one for React, Vue, etc.)

Besides, this type of overly generic names makes it harder to search relevant stuff, which makes them more annoying to me than silly names.

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

#316

Post by sweetjuly »

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.)

I always assumed part of the "data destroyer" folklore was from people flipping if/of by accident and destroying their data :)

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

#317

Post by bluehex »

andrewl wrote: post #50

I strongly agree with this. And what bothers me more than obscure or meaningless names like Viper are silly and embarrassing names like Hunchentoot. Names like that sometimes cause people to dismiss good software. It’s like using Comic Sans in a serious research paper. One area of the sciences does partly use names like this, and that is biology. Biologists do sometimes name a species after a famous person, as in the…

I agree. One recent example is in the Zig community a popular tool for benchmarking is "poop" [1] (Performance Optimizer Observation Platform). It could have easily been "pop" (Performance Observation Platform) and been cute enough without being intentionally cringe. Every time I see Zig now I think about "poop".

[1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/poop

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

#318

Post by halper »

hyperpape wrote: post #177
lr0 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.postgresql.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL

I know. My point is that almost everyone refers to it as Postgres, because they do not actually value the descriptiveness of "PostgreSQL".

I always thought it was because it is more obvious how to pronounce "postgres" than "PostgreSQL".

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

#319

Post by jaredhallen »

softskunk wrote: post #269
anyfoo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You know, this is true. And I've read any number of "you should never use dd, use this instead" articles over the years. But man, do I love me some dd.

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

#320

Post by jaredhallen »

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…

dd = (D)oes what it says it (D)oes
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