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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

#481

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. This article would certainly disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def... > the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait. Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?". > The Hoover…

> But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc.

In this example, you added "chopper", "patrol boat", and "handgun" to disambiguate them. There wouldn't have been enough context to do so otherwise, which IMHO is more aligned with the point the author was making.

If you were in the middle of a conversation about helicopters with people who knew lots of helicopter models, just saying "Cobra" would probably be fine. But in the software world, there are far too many obscure and new tools that are not at all clear without context. And the context just always happens to be all the dang things. A cutesy name could be any dang thing.

> It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.

I think you're just being selective because you disagree. A better example was:

> “We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue.”

If we want to cherry pick, your comment has:

> When you open your medicine cabinet

You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new. It's common usage and doesn't need to be disrupted by someone overly proud of a basic thing they made. You didn't call it Wapsooie, a "playful" take on WPSU (Wall-mounted pharmaceutical storage unit) or a MMC (Materia medica cabinet), or a whole host of other cutesy names or even acronyms that you might eventually get to if you were talking about medicine cabinets all day long, or designing or building them.

I mostly agree with the author. Software tools think they're so hilarious. I mean, the Virgil compiler is named "Aeneas" internally. Yet the cli command is "v3c"--Virgil III compiler.

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

#482
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…

So maybe the takeaway isn't "we lost the plot" vs "we never had it," but that there's always been a tension

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

#483

> 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…

It's more that they weren't random. There was a convention, a lineage, or a rule behind them. Modern projects often skip that step entirely and jump straight to branding, even when the thing is just plumbing

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

#484

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. The cognitive load is unavoidable and in some ways worse in industries with highly technical names. At one point in my career I was an engine calibrator at a large automotive OEM. Our lexicon included physics industry terms (BMEP, BTDC, VVT, etc), a large software package where every variable, table, and function was an acronym (we had about 75k t…

The article's complaint (as I read it) is more about incidental load: names that force you to context-switch just to figure out what category of thing you're dealing with

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

#485
post #195

Sometimes I am baffled at what gets onto the frontpage at HN, reminding us all that the people who vote stories and the people who comment on them are less of an overlapping group than you might think. I can understand the desire to have names that are more descriptive, but to claim we have "lost the plot" while holding up names like "awk" is contradictory at best. It sounds more like this person just had a personal…

I don't think the core argument is a vendetta against whimsy

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

#486
post #97

I believe strongly in this counterargument: https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam... Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so projects will evolve such that they are not accurately descriptive after time. (Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Servic…

God this article is 10000% better than the posted one. This is great:

> Names should not describe what you currently think the thing you’re naming is for. Imagine naming your newborn child "Doctor", or "SupportsMeInMyOldAge". Poor kid.

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

#488

The author is vastly overestimating the general legibility and familiarity of things they happen to know well and are used to. Boring names are also very generic, by definition, and thus often harder to remember. Especially when there are 10 other similar tools. Is it sql-validator, sql-schema-validator, schema-validate, db-validator, or god knows what else? Edit: I am in favor of better “sub titles” / descriptive sl…

> Why isn’t there a command line utility called “whatisthis” with a standard protocol that allows tools to give a brief description of what they are? Cheekily, man?

Hah good point. Maybe v1 just pulls the first few lines from man.

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

#489
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. Data(set) Definition. But that name does not make any sense whatsoever by itself in this context, neither for the tool (it hardly "defines" anything), nor for UNIX in general (there are no "datasets" in UNIX). Instead, it's specifically a reference to the DD statement in the JCL, the job control language, of many of IBM's mainframe operating systems of yore…

I just remember it as "Da Disk", early 2000's nu metal lyrics-style, because it does mad things to da disk, yo.

I guess the most relevant backcronym expansion is still "Disk Destroyer"
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