Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

This is a norm to the point of being a rule for Elm packages. The names are things like elm-csv, elm-json-decode-pipeline, elm-iso8601-date-strings. There's a strong preference in the community to name a package for exactly what it does, and differentiate on the author namespace if needed e.g. you may choose among coreygirard/elm-nonempty-list, mgold/elm-nonempty-list, and v-nys/elm-nonempty-list depending on which meets your needs best

I remember working on a ruby project and running into some problem with our env setup tool and just hitting "could not find nokogiri" (or an error to that effect) over and over and getting a little mad that I had to read this cutesypoo not-at-all descriptive name over and over while failing to get a danged website to run.

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To be sure, there are in-the-know parts of all the package names I just listed: what does JSON stand for? What does CSV stand for. What is the ISO and what is 8601? I guess the idea there is the descriptiveness ends at the edge of the language; the package name is too short a field to explain Javascript Object Notation, Comma Separated Values, or the ~~International Standards Organization~~ ok actually it's from "isos" meaning "same" date format.

My comment was mostly snarky, but I think the author is oblivious to their own biases and wrong. They even say:

> I read a lot into software history, and I can’t really say that there was an era of fantastic naming (even very experienced engineers made some very silly naming) but at least some current was trying to make some sense in the 80s; grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference).

"diff" is a good name. There is no sane argument that "awk" conveys anything meaningful about what the tool does. "grep" is utterly opaque until you know what it's an acronym for. The name itself conveys absolutely nothing. "cat" is actively misleading because it is a word, but the tool has nothing to do with felines at all.

The author only likes those names because they're familiar with them, not because they're good names.

> 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.

Sure. That's because I only have one medicine cabinet.

If I go on homedepot.com and search for medicine cabinets, the bold text is "Glacier Bay", "Zenith", "Kohler", etc.

What's frustrating about this article is that the author doesn't even realize why software packages have these funny names. Let's say I want to make a JavaScript package for parsing command-line arguments. Seems like "argparse" is a pretty clear name for that. Taken. Maybe "cliparse"? Taken. "args", "cli", "options", "argparser", "cli_argparser". Yup, all taken.

Packages need unique names so that package managers and imports can refer to them unambiguously. You can namespace them with the author's name but that just makes it confusing to talk about when two people say "args" but don't realize that one of them is talking about "@some_rando/args" and the other is talking about "@weird_startup/args".

So people just pick cute names. The name is an identifier, not a descriptor.

There is no real problem here, the author is just being cranky.

> Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering [...]. 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.

I realize this isn't chemistry, but aren't there like 15 elements that are named after people (Curium, Einsteinium, etc) another handful named after places (Americium, Tennessine, etc).

Also, a bunch are named after Norse and Greek gods like Thorium, Titanium, Plutonium.

The article also goes to talk about the Hoover Dam, but it's not like the government is immune to this either. We just had Operation Warp Speed which doesn't tell you anything about what that program did

By the same token, the sharp sign in C♯ is two plusses put together, and represents going a (half) step above C. Also, a minor second is one of the most dissonant intervals in western music, which is also a brilliant metaphor for how well C♯ meshes with C.

I’m glad you cited Ruby, as it’s definitely the exact opposite of what you said about elm. Every damn gem has an idiotic cutesy name. I think it’s one reason why every mature Rails project I’ve seen in the corporate world has direct dependencies on five or six different http client wrappers. New developers would look in the Gemfile, find no “http” anything, then google “ruby gem http client” and, since that happens to be a diverse category, eventually developers will find and add all such libraries.

I’m hoping that with AI, maybe this will be less common, because an AI agent should easily see that you have, say, Faraday installed already, and not bring in the noob magnet that is httparty.