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
#2That glorious day when I explained to my boss what wiki is and that we should have one internally, he fired "viki" into google, with smoothly honed muscle memory clicked first result..and got full screen of poon.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#3That glorious day when I explained to my boss what wiki is and that we should have one internally, he fired "viki" into google, with smoothly honed muscle memory clicked first result..and got full screen of poon.
At least you weren't the guy hitting a wall when trying to get a testing library integrated because it was named Testacular
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#4There is actually a good reason not mentioned, not to name tools by their purpose:
- the purpose will change
Your "silicon-valley-bank-integrator" tool will eventually need to be updated to do something else.
Or your "login-page-config-service" tool may eventually do more than just logins.
Using gibberish or mythological names gives a nice memorable name that doesn't lead (or mislead) you to believe it does a particular thing which may or may not be correct anymore.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#5That glorious day when I explained to my boss what wiki is and that we should have one internally, he fired "viki" into google, with smoothly honed muscle memory clicked first result..and got full screen of poon.
At least you weren't the guy hitting a wall when trying to get a testing library integrated because it was named Testacular
Back in college we had an old program used to analyse oscilloscope data named ANAL.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least you weren't the guy hitting a wall when trying to get a testing library integrated because it was named Testacular
Back in college we had an old program used to analyse oscilloscope data named ANAL.
At school we called our module analsyn for syntactic analyser. Good times.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#7If the community followed the author's guidance, we would have names like "Generic LLM wrapper 690" ("GLW690" if following the early programming language conventions.) or "Github clone with a different ideology 11"
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#8There is actually a good reason not mentioned, not to name tools by their purpose: - the purpose will change Your "silicon-valley-bank-integrator" tool will eventually need to be updated to do something else. Or your "login-page-config-service" tool may eventually do more than just logins. Using gibberish or mythological names gives a nice memorable name that doesn't lead (or mislead) you to believe it does a particu…
"purpose will change" argument actually proves the opposite point. When a tool's scope expands beyond its name, the descriptive name tells you something went wrong. But even if so, if you have to rename "login-page-config-service" to "auth-config-service" it is not really a big deal, renaming will be much cheaper if you're renaming to descriptive names. Most importantly though, I wouldn't optimize to avoid renaming (happens once, maybe twice in a project's lifetime) by making discovery hard (happens every single time someone encounters the tool).
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#9Yeah, this is a bit relative. Use microsoft tools/products (especially cloud/office) that came out in the past decade and you'll appreciate every other naming pattern.
My subjective view is that names should be exotic, flamboyant, unique and generally wild when it comes to tools. sticking your company's name as a prefix into everything (or the flagship product's) is confusing and only hurts you.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#10There is actually a good reason not mentioned, not to name tools by their purpose: - the purpose will change Your "silicon-valley-bank-integrator" tool will eventually need to be updated to do something else. Or your "login-page-config-service" tool may eventually do more than just logins. Using gibberish or mythological names gives a nice memorable name that doesn't lead (or mislead) you to believe it does a particu…
A good reason to use arbitrary code names before assigning a more helpful name upon release of something deemed to now be generally usable, beyond developers with caveats.