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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

#391

Post by em500 »

thiht wrote: post #389

Is fun not allowed anymore? In the past 3 days I've seen posts and comments on HN saying that: - everything in interfaces should be useful, decorative icons are bad - presentation slides should not use animations - now fun name are forbidden too apparently What the fuck? > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name Do you want to enter the discussion on how physicists named quark…

- Almost everything on blogs and HN are opinions, so don't take things things too seriously

- Fun and humour are subjective, and a substantial part derives from novelty and subvertin expectations. It's hard to make something fun for an audience that has already seen such dozens of times.

- The audience('s background and expectations) is diverse and varies with time. So what's considered "fun" is audience specific and often cyclical.

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

#392

Post by tliltocatl »

MageOfTheEast wrote: post #329

Nondescriptive 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 read…

Oh, STEM naming… Especially mathematics. How can you tell that a "set" is different from a "group" different from a "manifold" different from a "category"? Then there is a lot of seemingly unrelated things called "space" (they are all actually a topological space, but when studying e. g. vector spaces one might not yet have been into that). "Field" is two absolutely unrelated things in physics and algebra, sometimes these domains even intersect! Linear programming, no real relation to computer programming at all, "programming" used to mean "optimization". Calling stuff after their discoverers might be non-descriptive, but giving a misleadingly descriptive name that also collides is way worse - yet people working with this manage just fine.

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

#393

Post by thiht »

pas wrote: post #390
thiht wrote: post #389

Is fun not allowed anymore? In the past 3 days I've seen posts and comments on HN saying that: - everything in interfaces should be useful, decorative icons are bad - presentation slides should not use animations - now fun name are forbidden too apparently What the fuck? > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name Do you want to enter the discussion on how physicists named quark…

the whole post/topic has amazing engagement farming potential the correct response should be the "that's bait" GIF/meme (from the aptly namee Fury Road documentary) https://imgur.com/gallery/thats-bait-FOwZ77O

You're right, when looking into it it's just flameware in the end

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

#394

Post by port11 »

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 agree we never had it in the first place, and that it ultimately doesn't add up to much. It seems like just a familiarity problem.

If I'm diagnosing something at 2AM, I don't care whether my database queries were written with Zapatos or PG-ORM, even if the latter is clearer. As long as you use the tools, you know what they do.

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

#395

Post by swiftcoder »

pdpi wrote: post #302
abetusk wrote: post #253

Earlier 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…

> "never had it in the first place" is absolutely correct. To be clear: I didn't mean to imply this is a bad thing. GNU's Not Unix, Pine Is Not Elm, TIP Isn't Pico all share one important characteristic — their audience is expected to know what Unix, Elm, Pico are, and saying "X is not Y" implies "X is specifically, deliberately an alternative to Y, in the same style as Y". If you know what GNU and YACC are, you prob…

> their audience is expected to know what Unix, Elm, Pico are

Of course, the context for these references are all kind of anchored in the 90s. Someone first discovering Bison in the year of our lord 2025 is unlikely to have the foggiest clue what YACC was...

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

#396

Post by xg15 »

I noticed this with companies first, though at least it always made some sort of sense that a meaningless name would make it easier to pivot.

If your name is "The Database Company", but at some point find you'd rather do Blockchain and then later AI, the name might be an obstacle.

If you call yourself "Gworp" in the first place, you'll have no such problem.

(Though in not sure if "Mt Gox" aka "Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange" would be a positive or negative example for that)

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

#397

Post by swiftcoder »

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.

I think this runs into the intersection of the "code is art" and "code is a tool" crowds. I like to name my API methods with a little whimsy too...

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

#398

Post by Rumengol »

This just feels like an old man yelling at clouds, trying to convince himself that the grass in greener in the other field.

> 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 happens every day. In every scientific field there is a technical name and then the name everyone remembers. Nobody will understand if I speak about ENSG00000164690, but if I say it's the Sonic HedgeHog gene then it starts to make sense, because funny names are memorable.

> awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials)

I'd like to see anyone try to defend how using the creator's initials in a tool name describe its function. Unless you researched the tool's history, there is no way to know that.

Yet another "why the tools I use are the best and the tools you use suck", with a weird focus on naming instead of function.

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

#399

Post by gsliepen »

jrm4 wrote: post #201

I'll die on the proverbial hill that the absolute worst instance of this has always been GIMP, which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago. It was and perhaps still is, a solid competitor to Photoshop, but any unfamiliar grownup is, quite reasonably, going to never ever ever trust anything to do serious work with a name like that.

I used GIMP before I ever used Photoshop. My experience was the opposite. I think that means the UIs are different, but there is no one that is objectively better, it's just a matter of what your expectations are, which are set by whatever you learned first.

As for CMYK support: why do designers even need to use this? Sure, not every RGB is the same, and it took some while before we even got sRGB as some standard, but the same goes for CMYK: every printer has its own profile. I had the displeasure of trying to get the CMYK profile of a "professional" printing company that only accepted files in CMYK, and they didn't even know which profile their printers used. Ideally you would send a RGB file including the display profile your screen uses, and then the printing facility converts that to whatever CMYK they need.

Of course there are also special colors or effects outside of RGB/CMYK that you might want to use when printing something, that's something else.

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