Is it just me or the website is completely unreadable? Black text on a dark-gray background
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
361–370 of 563 posts
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#362Ok man, now give me a moment, I need to administer my weightloss weekly injection of L-Histidyl-2-methylalanyl-L-alpha-glutamylglycyl-L-threonyl-L-phenylalanyl-L-threonyl-L-seryl-L-alpha-aspartyl-L-valyl-L-seryl-L-seryl-L-tyrosyl-L-leucyl-L-alpha-glutamylglycyl-L-glutaminyl-L-alanyl-L-alanyl-N6-(N-(17-carboxy-1-oxoheptadecyl)-L-gamma-glutamyl-2-(2-(2-aminoethoxy)ethoxy)acetyl-2-(2-(2-aminoethoxy)ethoxy)acetyl)-L-lysy…
1 for the money 2 for the green 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#363> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. This article would certainly disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def... > the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait. Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?". > The Hoover…
> > 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…
> - So so many acronyms from NMR: COSY, TOCSY, NOESY
My favourite: MAS, for magic angle spinning. Because every paper needs a bit of magic.
Scientists are the wrong population to pick if you want people who dislike silly names. They are everywhere because we don’t hate fun, and it does make things memorable. We’re also fond of naming things after people, which is as un-descriptive as it gets.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#364Earlier 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. Lawrencium has entered the chat.
Off-topic, but it always amuses me that the sleepy town of Livermore, CA, known locally for its vineyards and an outlet mall, is immortalized in the Periodic Table, instead of the other greater places like New York or Chicago. Chicago even had the world's first nuclear reactor, but no luck.
Ytterby is an otherwise pretty insignificant small town of 6k inhabitants in Sweden, but it has FOUR elements named after it: yttrium, terbium, ytterbium, and erbium.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#365Might as well just name it after the last name of the author. Like how physics has the Maxwell equations, we’d have the Torvalds Operating System.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#366Earlier 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 had remembered it was "convert and copy", but cc was already taken by the c compiler so they shifted it down a letter. That might have been apocryphal.
Same here. But I also seem to remember claims that this isn't true…
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#367why is this stupid ai-generated text on hn?
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#368By this standard, ChatGPT is an excellent name: it's a generative pre-trained transformer that chats with you.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#369I was just discussing this today funny enough. How long until someone goes for broke and just names their app "peepee poopoo"?
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yes, I am simply highlighting that programmers have not used descriptive names consistently... well, ever (reinforcing the point the GP made).
The entire premise of the OP is simply wrong.