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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

#371

Post by Oreb »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #299
moregrist wrote: post #147

Earlier 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 astrophysics has MACHOs and WIMPs.

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

#372

Post by pharrington »

tolciho wrote: post #326
WJW wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $? 1

That is not GNU tar's output. You might wanna make sure your installation is ok.

edit: maybe i missed the joke?

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

#373

Post by nineteen999 »

usefulcat wrote: post #343
necovek wrote: post #258

Earlier 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.

Perl stands for “practical extraction and report language”

Also "pathlogically eclectic rubbish lister".

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

#374

Post by f1shy »

classified wrote: post #366
f33d5173 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had it learned as "data duplicator" or something like that... seems also bogus.

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

#375

Post by richardc323 »

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…

Ha, for the last 30 years I have been convinced it was Disk Direct.

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

#376

Post by Oreb »

gowld wrote: post #210
wpollock wrote: post #13

If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?

Constantly Swapping its Eight Megabytes, of course. https://google.com/search?q=Eight+Megabytes++And+Constantly+...

“Emacs Makes Any Computer Slow” is another one I remember from back in the days.

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

#378

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

wredcoll wrote: post #157
collinmcnulty wrote: post #27

The problem with descriptive names is that they start descriptive but then become proper nouns. At a former employer in the Fortune 100 outside the software industry, everything started with a descriptive name, that then became an acronym. And as every project and tool inevitably developed its own idiosyncrasies, the descriptive name pretty soon didn't tell you anything useful about the project at all. It is an unavo…

Knowing mysql is a database and not a socket wrench is mildly useful but it's more important that I know whether or not it supports enums.

Spanner is a wrench, or database

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

#380

Post by silvester23 »

jrowen wrote: post #352
dylan604 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!").

Unobtanium was a thing in fiction long before Avatar.
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