I had to discover this myself. when I first started working on personal projects on my PC, I'd give each of them some whimsical name, usually a pun or play on a quote from a tv show or song lyric. then in a few months time I'd come looking for the project and have to spend five minutes scrolling through a bunch of esoteric word formations and random half sentences trying to remember what whimsical mood I was in when I made the project. now I just name everything whatever I think I'm most likely to remember in 3 months. I do find it a little sad, losing some creativity and colour, so maybe one day I'll make a tag/shadow title system so I don't need directly descriptive names
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
321–330 of 563 posts
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#322GNU'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…
This, plus it's less obtuse than drug naming, and about on par with any other random product on the market.
Which is not to claim the general market is full of good names - clearly it is not. But I don't think it's below par at any point in its existence.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#323GNU'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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Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 :)
I thought the more common mistake with dd was picking the wrong disk to write to (especially when using /dev/sdc type naming instead of /dev/disk/by-id/whatever naming). Flipping source/dest and overwriting data is a problem I associate with the tar command.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > 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…
Physics has "Strangeness" and "Charm Quarks" My own field Materials Engineering has: "Hardness", "Toughness", Resilience", etc. which all describe different properties. "Ferromagnetic" or "Ferrimagnetic best believe those are different.
and, of course, can't forget the derivatives of position after jerk being snap, crackle, and pop [1] after, you know, Rice Krispies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Relevant XKCD Https://xkcd.com/1168/
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.
$ tar --help
tar: unknown option -- -
usage: tar {crtux}[014578beFfHhjLmNOoPpqsvwXZz]
[blocking-factor | format | archive | replstr]
[-C directory] [-I file] [file ...]
tar {-crtux} [-014578eHhjLmNOoPpqvwXZz] [-b blocking-factor]
[-C directory] [-F format] [-f archive] [-I file]
[-s replstr] [file ...]
$ echo $?
1Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#327Sometimes I am baffled at what gets onto the frontpage at HN, reminding us all that the people who vote stories and the people who comment on them are less of an overlapping group than you might think. I can understand the desire to have names that are more descriptive, but to claim we have "lost the plot" while holding up names like "awk" is contradictory at best. It sounds more like this person just had a personal…
> but to claim we have "lost the plot" while holding up names like "awk" is contradictory at best
My argument is that even a name like awk is much more relevant to the people who used this software back then, of course it was not the best way to name it, but at least it held some meaning to it. Unlike modern software, awk and others were not written with the consideration of a wide user-base in mind. Regarding whether we "lost the plot" or not, I believe that we did, because as mentioned, in the 80s there was a current of people who named software conventionally, and up to the 2010s, the names still used to hold some rational even when word-played or combined with cutey names.
> It sounds more like this person just had a personal vendetta against cute sounding names, not against the names being uselessly non-descriptive.
Not at all, I find it quite fun, just unprofessional.
--
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Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#328Earlier 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.
Especially since, IIRC, it actually predates C.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#329Nondescriptive names are not necessarily wrong or impeding. The author mentions science, yet STEM is filled with nondescriptive names: we have "Pythagorean theorem" instead of "right triangle sidelength theorem", "Newton's method" instead of "iterated tangent root-finding", "Lambda calculus" instead of "abstraction-application evaluation". Although they are not whimsical, these terms mean nothing to a first-time reader.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#330> We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue
Would it be better if it was this:
> We’re using ConfigurationManager for configuration management, which feeds into CLI for the CLI, and then WebSocketHandler handles our WebSocket connections, PermissionManager manages permissions, all through JobQueue for our job queue
I think the author makes the opposite point of intended)