431–440 of 563 posts
There was never a plot to follow; if there isn't a better name for an editor than "vi" (because "ed" is already taken) then maybe they should try getting rid of verbs too to give it more "refreshed" branding.
Imagine calling your firm "Commerical Firm". Would this even be allowed?
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> I’m not sure I like awk, sed, or cat sed is not "stream editor" as it says above, it's "stream ed ", where ed was another prexisting program which was essential and everybody knew it. its name was from "editor" shortened. the sed commands are the ed commands. so, it's almost not possible to say "i don't like the name", it rests on a rich tradition, it's the stream version of ed. (ed commands are very similar to vi…
> ed commands are very similar to vi commands at heart vi was build on top of ed. Ed was the Unix line editor, which is why all the commands after a colon have the form of "start,endcommand", eg "1,$p" would list all the lines of a file on your tty/decwriter. 1,$s/findexp/replace/g would s ubstitute all examples ("g") of findexp on the lines 1 through EOF
Funny that they are still some of the most efficient and powerful interfaces.
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> However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. I feel like this is approximately the third time I'm learning this.
I've been using Linux for almost 20 years, including sed a lot of that time, I'm sure I've heard it before, I must have, but when parent wrote it I was like "aah, that makes sense".
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I think perhaps the articles argument gets less strong then? It's claimed grep is "well named" because even though it's not obvious when you first read it, that it being a contraction for "global reg ex print" and hence memorable. I'm not sure the same argument can't be made for libsodium which assuming the reader is familiar with NaCl (the same as the assumption that the previous reader is familiar with regex) then…
Names fall on a spectrum on this argument. Sodium is not really random because of the use of "salt" on crypto. It's like saying that libsodium is part of your crypto. awk is more random. The argument goes stronger with projects where the creator seemed to just roll the dice with the name.
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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!").
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libiberty was always my favorite ridiculous name. It was named so you can link it with -liberty.
Used to be that Ruby's "rubygems" library had an alias "ubygems" so that when invoking ruby with the -r option (to require a library) you could say "ruby -rubygems". Sadly, they seem to have removed this alias library sometime around Ruby 2.4.
The stdlib still contains `un.rb` though: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/d428d086c23219090d68eb2d02...
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.
Wait until you learn about Git. ;)
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.
Git as a name is our daily reminder that pre-mainstream programmers were rebellious against the mainstream (to put it as generously as I could) before corporate interests took over. but i encourwge you to look up that story yourself.
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> > 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.