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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

#341

Post by isoprophlex »

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…

I just remember it as "Da Disk", early 2000's nu metal lyrics-style, because it does mad things to da disk, yo.

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

#342

Post by usefulcat »

Kevin-Xi wrote: post #310
anyfoo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One explanation that left a deep impression on me is[1]: it stands for 'Copy and Convert' and was renamed to `dd` only because `cc` was reserved for the C compiler! [1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/6835/192313

Reminds me of IBM => HAL, just the other direction

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

#343

Post by usefulcat »

necovek wrote: post #258
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…

Even GNU is a recursive acronym, Emacs a convoluted one... What's Perl, Python, Java... all about? Remember how JavaScript was named? Don't mention Go (go-lang) or Pascal... Git, Mercurial, CVS anyone? I believe this makes much ado about nothing.

Perl stands for “practical extraction and report language”

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

#345

Post by rurban »

> "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".

But before those silly names came up, every company used their own three letter abbrevations for their tooling, which was not much better. They had descriptive names, but using the abbrevations only didn't help, and you needed a company wide dictionary. Like "We’re using CMT2 for configuration management, which feeds into CCM for the CLI, and then WSM handles our WebSocket connections, PM manages permissions, all through AJQ for our job queue."

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

#346

Post by rswail »

fsckboy wrote: post #333
bee_rider wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I like awk, sed, or cat, I think these are just names we’re used to, not good really. diff seems ok. grep almost has an onomatopoeic nature to it… like, it sounds like you are grabbing or ripping the patterns out of the file, right?

> I’m not sure I like awk, sed, or cat sed is not "stream editor" as it says above, it's "stream ed ", where ed was another prexisting program which was essential and everybody knew it. its name was from "editor" shortened. the sed commands are the ed commands. so, it's almost not possible to say "i don't like the name", it rests on a rich tradition, it's the stream version of ed. (ed commands are very similar to vi…

> ed commands are very similar to vi commands at heart

vi was build on top of ed.

Ed was the Unix line editor, which is why all the commands after a colon have the form of "start,endcommand", eg "1,$p" would list all the lines of a file on your tty/decwriter.

1,$s/findexp/replace/g would s ubstitute all examples ("g") of findexp on the lines 1 through EOF

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

#347

Post by girvo »

> 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.

This so isn't important, but this just isn't true at least in chemistry. Plenty of molecules have names that aren't IUPAC based, but instead are based on prefixes/suffixes that are common to the field (more in pharmacological chemistry but not just!)

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

#348

Post by rswail »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #162
plorkyeran wrote: post #98

> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations. If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance…

So few of us use physical tapes these days, but the "tape archive" (tar) remains ubiquitous. Not entirely unserious: "awk" is a good name because it is three characters to type "rg" is better than "grep" because it is two fewer characters type

There's a reason why the basic Unix file commands are ls, cp, mv, rm.

They're easy to type on a TTY.

grep is from the ed command "g/re/p" which is g (all lines, short for "1,$") /re/ regular expression to search for, "p" to print the lines.

It still works in vi.

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

#349

Post by tempest_ »

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.

eh, in 2025 SEO ( Whatever the jargon is for LLM) is as important or perhaps more important so that you can search and find documentation and issues etc

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

#350

Post by [deleted] »

isoprophlex wrote: post #341
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…

I just remember it as "Da Disk", early 2000's nu metal lyrics-style, because it does mad things to da disk, yo.

[deleted]
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