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Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to type that word over and over for the rest of the time I have to maintain an application and I won't make others do it either.

Some projects have been accused of being to cheeky, or taking metaphors too far, and that can be forgiven but CockroachDB might as well have been named Pancreatic Cancer or Genital Warts as far as I'm concerned.

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"lol" is the only response to this. fine then, don't use it. why did you even click on this story?

it must be tough being so sensitive, let along being so irrational about judging a piece of tech on actual merit. big diff between cockroachdb and genital warts

Thanks for your concern. I'll be fine.

This sort of reply seems so ludicrous to me. It's a bug. How can you guys use the net, knowing what spider-related metaphors lie hidden in its tangled web?

Easy. It has deeper roots in the internet for me than in insects. You know, multiple definitions.

Cockroach on the other hand is very strongly associated with insects and disgust.

I do think it interferes with adoption. I don't think it'll kill it though.

I think the name's actually pretty good at selling it's key value, particularly to business people / management.

"It's called cockroach db - because it'll survive anything"

That connotation seems obvious but I didn't pick up on it until months after I heard about CockroachDB. For one, a minority of people who know about cockroaches know about their resilience. For two, people who _do_ know that still know that cockroaches are disgusting. The reptile brain is going to react with revulsion even if the higher brain finds the metaphor.

The reptile brain is going to react with revulsion

As someone who knows someone who is very scared of reptiles but had a pet cockroach the irony of this statement amuses me greatly.

For me, I've overlooked it because by the name I assumed it was meant to be a "worse mongoDB". I've found out recently it's more like Postgre.

I stepped on a cockroach last night. Seemed pretty fragile to me.

The colony in your wall endured zero downtime.

It's not called the World Wide Puss Filled Spider Bite, it's called the World Wide Web, I honestly never thought of the spider connotation till you mentioned it.

To be fair, in Ye Olden Days, web crawlers[0] were called spiders.

[0] Of course, web crawlers are no longer called web crawlers, either

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