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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

#421

Post by zem »

necovek wrote: post #303
pdpi wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Concurrent Versions/Versioning System" is a pretty reasonable one, though.

Then Gimp is also a great name, right? GNU-is-not-Unix Image Manipulation Program: immediatelly obvious what it does as soon as you learn what the acronym stands for. Or Gtk even: G nu-is-not-Unix Image Manipulation Program T ool K it (later changed to refer to Gnome instead of Gimp I believe).

and gdk was, delightfully enough, the gnu's not unix image manipulation program toolkit drawing kit

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

#422

Post by gottheUIblues »

tgv wrote: post #354
girvo wrote: post #347

> 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?

Except protium, deuterium and tritium

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

#423

Post by JackFr »

> 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.

Well if they work for a drug company they will say “Let’s call this phlogistotheremone but sell it under the name Zyphyrax so that doctors and patients will refer to the same medication by different names.”

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

#424

Post by zem »

bitwize wrote: post #154

> 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. Ummmmm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_compounds_wit... "Yo…

"windowpane" was my first thought :) such a lovely play on the "-ane" suffix

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

#426

Post by delaminator »

necovek wrote: post #258
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…

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.

The 2000s Plan9 community asserts "Gnu is Not Useful" as the correct expansion.

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

#427

Post by hoherd »

ekidd wrote: post #199
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. Traditionally, according to folklore? "Delete disk" or "destroy data". (Because it was commonly used to write raw disk blocks.)

I always thought it was "disk dump"

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

#428

Post by squigz »

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.

> which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.

That "perhaps" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence. GIMP has never, even now, been a serious competitor to Adobe's products for professionals. To suggest that if they simply had a better name they would be the top dog is laughable.

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

#429

Post by apetrovic »

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…

You don't need to go that deep into the article. Just - emacs. Of course I know what it is, I had to google the name to find it's EditorMACroS

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

#430

Post by assimpleaspossi »

A lot of the issue has to do with marketing. Some people name their tool for the pizazz it might generate and gain them fame or it's an actual company motivation. Instead of a hammer is a hammer and a heavy hammer should be named "heavy_hammer".

EDIT: I just noticed that the marketing angle is mentioned in the article.

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