We should all copy from the Haskell community. Instead of coming up with a random name like "append" for a List function, we should appeal to our deep intuition of monoids and use the much more intuitive "".
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
351–360 of 563 posts
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#352Earlier 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…
Americium, Einsteinium, Unobtanium also show chemistry isn't so uptight as suggested.
Unobtanium is fiction from the movie Avatar lol
Notoriously bad exposition I might add ("This is unobtanium. This is what we're here for!").
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#353> 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. Plen…
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#354> 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. Plen…
And don't isomers share their name? And isotopes don't change the name either, I think?
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#355Why is Go a very silly name and not Python, C, Rust, or literally any programming language name?
COBOL. Now there's a sensible name.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#356We had this debate at my company and the end result was a ban on “random” service names.
So we ended up with “auth service” instead of something like “Galactus”. The problem of course is that “auth service” isn’t searchable in our monorepo and it was a nightmare to find or discuss any info or references to the service itself. Now imagine if docker was called “container manager”. Good luck googling that and disentangling it from all the search results.
The value of a name doesn’t come from it being self-explanatory but rather from it being a pseudo-unique identifier. The small cognitive tax of remembering it serves as a shared bookmark between people that you can refer to when discussing or speaking to others about it - whether we’re talking about docker, Linux, or another person.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#357I strongly disagree with this: calling your thing that serves webhooks “webhooks” or “webhook-service” sounds nice and neat when you’re looking in a repo list but you immediately impose a tax on everyone in the org: now everyone in a conversation has to distinguish between “webhooks” as the proper name of a particular service and “webhooks” as the name of a particular pattern. Multiply this by all the various components of a modern software ecosystem, and you turn your companies infrastructure into a private language piecemeal and, what’s worse, it’s a private languages outsiders and newcomers think they understand and so they often take much longer to discover what the actual services are.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#358Forget about tools, in most part of the world, the name programmer and software developers like to call themselves namely software engineer is not even considered part of engineering professions.
That's why you find most of software engineering department in Computer Science Faculty or School, not in the Faculty of Engineering.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#359GNU'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.
Java is easy - named after the coffee beans of the coffee they used to drink...
CVS (noticed already mentioned by a sibling comment) is just an abbreviation.
Python - well Monty Python
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#360I read an article linked on HN once (can't remember what it was) that recommended giving totally meaningless names to monoliths. The point being that one should not use the name as a crutch to decide what should or should not go in the service.
So at my last job, we called our monolith anubis. It always brought joy when someone asked for an explanation.