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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

#401

Post by ozgung »

Great post and I think this extends to machine learning names, although not that severe. Maybe it all started with Adam. When I say “I used Adam for optimization” this means I used a random opaque thing for optimization. If I say “I used an ADAptive Moment estimation based optimizer” it becomes more transparent. Using human names or random nouns has been a trend. Lora, Sora, Dora, Bert, Bart, Robert, Roberta, Dall-e, Dino, Sam… With varying capitalization for each letter. Even the Transformer. What does it transform exactly? But it gets worse. Here is a list of architectures that may replace Transformers [0]: Linformer, Longformer, Reformer, Performer, Griffin, BigBird, Mamba, Jamba... What’s going on?

[0]https://huggingface.co/blog/ProCreations/transformers-are-ge...

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

#402

Post by lloeki »

pharrington wrote: post #372
tolciho wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ 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?

> maybe i missed the joke?

the bomb specifies only "unix" so you can't assume GNU (which, aha, is Not Unix)

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

#403

Post by ezconnect »

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…

The problem with current naming is it now using common names like coffee and it's hard to search for them or relate to them. At least the old Unix naming are kinda unique and sometimes means something. Unlike today.

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

#404

Post by PhilipRoman »

eckesicle wrote: post #356

We 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 disentangl…

It's especially fun once the service is superseded. Guess which one of these services handles MAC address allocation and storage: macaddr_db or atom-util?

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

#405

Post by PhilipRoman »

longemen3000 wrote: post #285

That is one thing i like about the Julia package ecosystem. The general Registry (where package metadata is stored and where you go to register a new package), recommends using explicit names over short acronyms. For example, DifferentialEquations.jl is a package that does differential equations in julia (recognizable via the .jl suffix). What does Garlic.jl do? Exactly, garlic (the vegetable) modelling.

Does Julia registry have active moderation? Otherwise I'd expect to see 99 different variations of DifferentialEquations.jl

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

#406

Post by bmacho »

usefulcat wrote: post #342
Kevin-Xi wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

APL -> BQN where the author remembered the alphabet wrong : https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/54753804#5...

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

#407

Post by mr_mitm »

QuercusMax wrote: post #174
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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libiberty was always my favorite ridiculous name. It was named so you can link it with -liberty.

There is also https://github.com/gebi/libowfat

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

#408

Post by [deleted] »

sweetjuly wrote: post #316
ekidd wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. Traditionally, according to folklore? "Delete disk" or "destroy data". (Because it was commonly used to write raw disk blocks.)

I always assumed part of the "data destroyer" folklore was from people flipping if/of by accident and destroying their data :)

[deleted]

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

#409

Post by rahoulb »

swiftcoder wrote: post #397
HPsquared wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I remember writing a function to convert a string from snake case to camel case and calling it `humpify`. And another that would take a string and locate the constant with that name called `constantinople`.

But then, this is ruby and it's known for its unusual naming. Plus both also had sensible/boring aliases and they were for internal use only.

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