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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

#461

Post by fuzzfactor »

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…

>developers lost the plot on naming their tools

As a complete outsider it always seemed like the plot had never yet been found to begin with . . .

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

#462

Post by orthoxerox »

wombatpm wrote: post #158
forrestthewoods wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol no. There are literally a hundred plus Unix tools and commands. I couldn’t tell you what 90% of them mean. I sure as hell couldn’t have told you what sed stood for. And if you asked me tomorrow I also wouldn’t be able to tell you. C programmers are great. I love C. I wish everything had a beautiful pure C API. But C programmers are strictly banned from naming things. Their naming privileges have been revoked, per…

Relevant XKCD Https://xkcd.com/1168/

To quote bash.org (or qdb.us?), you have to talk to tar with a German accent:

    tar xzf file.tgz
where xzf stands for "extrakt ze feil"

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

#463

Post by xxs »

yard2010 wrote: post #419
eloisant wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java was originally called Oak but its creator because he could see an oak from his office, but marketing people at Sun thought Java would be more catchy. Yes it's named after coffee beans, but it has no relation whatsoever to the language or the way it was created, it's just a marketing name.

Imagine a parallel world in which Java is called Oak and it's actually nice from inception, not just like nice after decades.

compared to C, java was quite nice

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

#464

Post by djmips »

joleyj wrote: post #459
djmips wrote: post #458

This essay is not consistent. They ramble between company names Google ( which is a great name ) and tools like AWK which is not descriptive at all but a good name. But I do share his pain with onboarding when I joined Humungous Entertainment the tools or systems were called Sputm, Phlegm, Mucus, SPIT. There might have been a Bile. :-)

Have a Stoolap https://github.com/stoolap/stoolap

It's good to see it's written in Rust with full Acid compliance...

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

#466

Post by amadeuspagel »

marc_abonce wrote: post #315
wredcoll wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naming your library "data-testing-library" would be useful... until there's a second one at which point the specific name effectively becomes meaningless.

Case in point: @testing-library (the JS one for React, Vue, etc.) Besides, this type of overly generic names makes it harder to search relevant stuff, which makes them more annoying to me than silly names.

They also make things hard to talk about. When you mention testing library in an ordinary conversation without @ signs and dashes, people won't know whether you're talking about the concept of a testing library or a specific one.

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

#468

Post by misterpurple45 »

The author isn’t comparing apples with apples.

“Butterfly valve” is the name for a type of widget.

There are many instances of “butterfly valve”, some of which will have strange brand names.

Just like there are many “web frameworks”, each with weird and wonderful names (“Django”, “Rails”, “Spring” etc.)

We’re really not that different.

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

#469

Post by wrsh07 »

groos wrote: post #167
DSMan195276 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this definitely falls into the category of "I use them so they feel natural", there's nothing amazing about those names. The underlying problem is that you now run into so many named things (utilities, libraries, programs, etc.) in a day and they all have to differentiate themselves somehow. You can't name every crypto library `libcrypto` for obvious reasons.

Fine. Name it sodium-crypto.a or sodium.crypto.a or whatever. The author's complaint does hold water.

Without looking it up, is it sodium for "salt"? That's about as tethered to the actual use (salt + hash being a common crypto thing) as any of the names in the root comment

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

#470

Post by Dwedit »

xg15 wrote: post #396

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 On…

Mt. Gox is a name change done after the fact, it's just reinterpreting the original initials.
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