Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

Post by pharrington » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 3:32 PM UTC

tolciho wrote: post #528

pharrington wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not GNU tar's output. You might wanna make sure your installation is ok. edit: maybe i missed the joke?

Some drunks in a gnu-shaped echo chamber concluded that the world is gnu-shaped. That's not much a joke, if there is one here. Such presently popular axioms as "unix means linux" or "the userland must be gnu" or "bash is installed" can be shown as poor foundations to reason from by using a unix system that violates all those assumptions. That the XCDD comic did not define what a unix system is is another concern; the…

Post by tharkun__ » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 4:50 AM UTC

necovek wrote: post #552

tharkun__ wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, I was operating on a lot of zipped tars. Not sure what you are replying about. The other commenter already mentioned that the xkcd just said "valid", not return 0 (which to be fair is what the original non xkcd required so I guess fair on the mixup)

Oh, just funny mental gymnastics if we are aiming for survival in 10 seconds with a valid, exit code 0 tar command. :) As tar is a POSIX (ISO standard for "portable operating system interfaces") utility, I am also highlighting what might get us killed as all of us are mostly used to GNU systems with all the GNU extensions (think also bash commands in scripts vs pure sh too). No offense intended, just the hackers' cha…

    Initial release July 27, 1993; 32 years ago

Post by racl101 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 1:53 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #219

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.

Wait until you learn about Git. ;)

Post by gilcot » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 6:54 AM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #385

xxs wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java is easy - named after the coffee beans of the coffee they used to drink... CVS (noticed already mentioned by a sibling comment) is just an abbreviation. Python - well Monty Python

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.

Post by gilcot » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 7:14 AM UTC

nocman wrote: post #506

fsckboy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> sed is not "stream editor" as it says above, it's "stream ed" Well, according to the man page, it is indeed "stream editor": https://man.cat-v.org/unix_8th/1/sed I was already aware of its relation to 'ed' (having had to actually use 'ed' in ancient times). However that doesn't change the fact that it does stand for "stream editor". After reading your post, I thought "That doesn't seem right, I remember it specific…