Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools | Hacker News Reader

Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

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422 pointstodsacerdoti534 comments

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 BCPL.

Developers haven't "lost the plot", we never had it in the first place.

Inversely, Clang, LLDB, jq, fzf, loc are modern projects perfectly in line with the author's notion of a good name. "mise-en-place" is the perfect metaphor for what mise does.

> 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 (let's not get into the specifics of which ones, because that's a whole other can of complexity).

And even then the relation between the DD statement and the dd command in UNIX is rather tenuous. To simplify a lot, DD in JCL does something akin to "opening a file", or rather "describing to the system a file that will later be opened". The UNIX tool dd, on the other hand, was designed to be useful for exchanging files/datasets with mainframes. Of course, that's not at all what it is used for today, and possibly that was true even back then.

This also explains dd's weird syntax, which consists of specifying "key=value" or "key=flag1,flag2,..." parameters. That is entirely alien to UNIX, but is how the DD and other JCL (again, of the right kind) statements work.

I feel obliged to point out that C++ is C postincremented, that is to say it has the same value as C, but after you read it C gets incremented. The metaphor is flawless.

Even GNU is a recursive acronym, Emacs a convoluted one... What's Perl, Python, Java... all about? Remember how JavaScript was named? Don't mention Go (go-lang) or Pascal... Git, Mercurial, CVS anyone?

I believe this makes much ado about nothing.

The article even refers to AWK as being the initials of the authors. And posits this as "reasonable"?

Naming is hard, not least because "a million" new projects are spawned every day. And if you're going down a path of "rule the world" (even in a niche like infrastructure) you start by getting a .com domain, so choices are limited.

Plus the name has to be unique enough to Google.

> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for.

Traditionally, according to folklore? "Delete disk" or "destroy data". (Because it was commonly used to write raw disk blocks.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice_2000 was pretty clear about what it did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX less so.

In the same vein, my recollection is reading that the X windowing system is called X because it's the letter after "W", which was the original choice (because it's what the word "window" starts with), but it was already taken, so they went with X.

> what dd stands for

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.folklore.computers/HAWoZ...

The only thing that's different between the era when Bison as named and now is the proliferation. There is vastly more shit in open source with the cute names. Back then, one person could keep all the cute names for everything related to C and Unix in their head.

Naming is a big part of programming, you'd expect software to have good descriptive names.

I agree we never had it in the first place, and that it ultimately doesn't add up to much. It seems like just a familiarity problem.

If I'm diagnosing something at 2AM, I don't care whether my database queries were written with Zapatos or PG-ORM, even if the latter is clearer. As long as you use the tools, you know what they do.

There are two hard problems in computer science: caching things, naming things and off-by-one errors.

This, plus it's less obtuse than drug naming, and about on par with any other random product on the market.

Which is not to claim the general market is full of good names - clearly it is not. But I don't think it's below par at any point in its existence.

> UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS.

I doubt it is official, but I was told the name Unix was picked as it was "Multics with bits taken off".

> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for.

I always assumed “data dump” or something like.

GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix".

Yacc stands for "Yet Another C Compiler".

Nano was originally TIP which stood for "TIP Isn't Pico" but was later changed to Nano so as not to conflict with another Unix utility called tip [0]. Presumably nano was chosen as the metric prefix next larger than pico.

Personally, I'd prefer choosing a random string of 3-8 letters for command line tools. At least that would be better than naming programs using generic names (Keep, Bamboo, Chef, Salt) which leads to all sorts of name collisions.

From the article:

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

The mascot for an $8.8T dollar (supply side) software industry, larger than Google, Microsoft and Apple combined, is a cartoon penguin [1].

"never had it in the first place" is absolutely correct.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_nano

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...

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

Pretty sure dd is disk destroyer

> Yacc is called Bison

And when they named ‘Yet Another Compiler Compiler’ something tells me they weren’t being deadly serious.

dd = (D)oes what it says it (D)oes

> 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 of guessing. It's ridiculous to complain about "libsodium" and then hold up "awk" as a good name.

Yeah this definitely falls into the category of "I use them so they feel natural", there's nothing amazing about those names.

The underlying problem is that you now run into so many named things (utilities, libraries, programs, etc.) in a day and they all have to differentiate themselves somehow. You can't name every crypto library `libcrypto` for obvious reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libiberty was always my favorite ridiculous name. It was named so you can link it with -liberty.

cat is arguably from catenate, which is the smarter, shorter version of concatenate. By default, unadorned catenation is a joining (literally "making into a chain"), which is always together/with, so the con prefix is redundant. If you ever need a derivative of catenate that means splitting apart, you can coin discatenate, where the dis then plays an essential role.

Also, why is it that people are gregarious when they congregate, and not congregarious? Or why didn't they just gregate? There was such a Latin cognate verb without the con attached.

It also seems wrong? libsodium explains the logic in its name right on its about page. It's a fork of NaCL (the chemical formula for sodium salt), which itself is a plain acronym for "networking and cryptography library." Google doesn't seem like a good example, either. Wasn't that meant to be an allusion to the very large number googolplex, as in Google exists to tame the unfathomably large amount of information on the web? The author may or may not like those names, but they have a logic just like grep and awk do.

I’m not sure I like awk, sed, or cat, I think these are just names we’re used to, not good really. diff seems ok.

grep almost has an onomatopoeic nature to it… like, it sounds like you are grabbing or ripping the patterns out of the file, right?

However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.

So few of us use physical tapes these days, but the "tape archive" (tar) remains ubiquitous.

Not entirely unserious: "awk" is a good name because it is three characters to type "rg" is better than "grep" because it is two fewer characters type

> It's ridiculous to complain about "libsodium" and then hold up "awk" as a good name.

Awk is short, easy to pronounce, and difficult to confuse with anything else. It's nearly as perfect as a name can be.

> 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 of guessing.

You seem to have confused the concept of a "name" with that of a "description". The whole point of names is that they aren't descriptive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrariness#Linguistics

"It's ridiculous to complain about "libsodium" and then hold up "awk" as a good name."

I never really understood what was "wrong" with the NaCl library that it needed another version that does not have the string "nacl" somewhere in the name

I also remember Google named some heavily promoted non-cryptography project "NaCl" subsequent to the NaCl library's release making any searches for "NaCl" biased toward Google's software

I still use original NaCl, e.g., for CurveDNS, tinysshd, dq and dqcache, not libsodium

You don't need to go that deep into the article. Just - emacs. Of course I know what it is, I had to google the name to find it's EditorMACroS

Well that's jargon in any industry. It makes no sense, you take a minute to learn it, and now it's part of your vocabulary.

At least these kinds of acronyms had utility once upon a time, when typing real estate was valuable and you input commands by hand for hours a day. Typing cat vs concat is hours of productivity save.

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

The problem with current naming is it now using common names like coffee and it's hard to search for them or relate to them. At least the old Unix naming are kinda unique and sometimes means something. Unlike today.

Nitpick: Correct me if wrong but I think cat is catenate not concatenate

IMHO, the best names are the ones that are easiest to type. I have read several accounts of authors choosing names for this reason

I sometimes rename other peoples' executables (cf. libraries), not the ones in the traditional UNIX userland, but the ones with goofy names.^1 I will rename them to something I find easier to type and less annoying. I create symbolic links with the original names if I think they will be required^2

With own software, I give every program a number, the source file is named according to the number and the executable name is a short prefix followed by the number. All names are the same length. I have a text file that lists what each program does if I forget

I put a description in a comment at the top of each source file as a sort of header. Then I can do something like

   head src/???.l

for a list of descriptions

1. Needless to say, Arthur Whitney's software does not get renamed. No need, he gets it

2. I will also rewrite the argument parsing and "usage:" output if it annoys me

The best way to determine what a program does is to read the source. This is one reason I prefer to compile programs from source instead of using "binary packages"

I also think the names that are chosen for so-called "tech" companies are routinely quite silly, but that's another discussion

>developers lost the plot on naming their tools

As a complete outsider it always seemed like the plot had never yet been found to begin with . . .

i think you are misunderstanding the point. with awk, sed, grep they actually hold relevance to the tools whereas a file browser named "zephrus" holds no connection to the actual file browser.

awk is short for awkward, like awkword, for awkwardly manipulating words (text).

> 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 Dam is a dam, named after the president who commissioned it, not “Project Thunderfall” or “AquaHold.”

It was actually called the "Boulder Canyon Project" while being built, referred to as "Hoover Dam" even though finished during the Roosevelt administration, officially called "Boulder Dam", and only later officially renamed to "Hoover Dam".

The fact that Herbert Hoover initiated the project tells you nothing meaningful about it. Would "Reitzlib" be a better name than "Requests"?

> If you wrote 100 CLIs, you will never counter with a cobra.

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.

> 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.

When you open your medicine cabinet, do you look for a jar labeled "acetylsalicylic acid", "2-propylvaleric acid", or "N-acetyl-para-aminophenol"? Probably not.

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

> > 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.

The author is just wrong. Chemistry is fairly jam-packed with various cutesy names either to amuse the authors or because they’re attempting to make an algorithm memorable to the field.

Off the top of my head:

- SHAKE and RATTLE: Bond constraint algorithms.

- CHARMm: An MD package but you’d never guess it from the name

- Amber: Another MD package that you’d never guess from the name.

- So so many acronyms from NMR: COSY, TOCSY, NOESY

The list goes on and on and permeates most of the subfields in one form or another.

If you want really cutesy names, though, look in molecular biology.

Biology is another discipline where the author is wrong. See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein

> 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.

But a meteorologist might:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEVE

Good job pointing out the logical inconsistencies so succinctly. That article is yet another case of a solution looking for a problem.

I think the author makes a hard distinction between consumer products and infrastructure/engineering products. The Shelby Cobra has a funny name, but its engine is the memorably named V8. The Hoover Dam is a dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge.

We can argue about namespace pollution and overly long names, but I think there's a point there. When I look at other profession's jargon, I never have the impression they are catching Pokemon like programmers do.

Except for the ones with Latin and Greek names, but old mistakes die hard and they're not bragging about their intelligibility.

Following on on the DoD example, the field of astronomy is infamous for its terrible acronyms: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~gpetitpas/Links/Astroacro.html

> 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.

Military codenames are a bit different; they're deliberately random words, assigned so that no-one can guess the nature of the programme based on the name.

(Companies sometimes do this, too, for internal stuff.)

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 Service" simultaneously, and then have to rely on a lot of thick context to know what the distinctions are)

I’ve been told multiple times in multiple jobs that I’m good at naming things, and I love whimsical names. A couple rules I’ve internalized are:

- if it’s hard to name, that’s a good sign that you haven’t clearly delineated use case or set of responsibilities for the thing

- best case for a name is that it’s weird and whimsical on first encounter. Then when somebody tells you the meaning/backstory for the name it reveals some deeper meaning/history that makes it really memorable and cements it in your mind

- the single best tech naming thing I’ve encountered (I didn’t come up with it) was the A/B testing team at Spotify naming themselves “ABBA”

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.

I totally agree with this, and will add that another benefit of whimsical names is discoverability. If your project is named plugin-update-checker and I want to find documentation on it, it's likely going to be buried in a bunch of other irrelevant search results about plugin update checkers in general. If it was called SocketToMe instead, I'm going to find much better search results.

I suppose it depends on your goals, but that scope restraint can be a good thing.

Do one thing, do it well, and while you're at it call yourself by the thing you do so you remember that's what you ought to be doing. A bit wordy for unix but you get the idea.

> 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 tunable parameters, each with an acronym), and all the internal company jargon and acronyms you'd expect in a large corporation. But every name was as technical and functional as the author would desire.

During my first month I was exhausted. I would doze off in afternoon meetings or pass out in my car as soon as I pulled in the driveway. I finally mentioned this to a more senior coworker and his insight was that my brain was working overtime because it was busy learning another language. He was entirely right! The constant mental load was a very real and tangible load. He relayed an anecdote when he went to S. America on his honeymoon and despite him and his wife having taken ~4 years of HS/college Spanish the mental work they had to do to function basically nixed half the daily activities they had planned due to exhaustion. That was what I was experiencing.

The idea that more technical and specific names reduces mental load does not track with my experience. The complexity is intrinsic not incidental and I don't think it has much to do with the specific names chosen.

In mobile telephony, one of the first things new hires are told is “don’t even try to work out what all the acronyms stand for; it won’t help”. You just have eat all the alphabet soup. Worse is that they nest themselves. You can have acronyms where every letter stands for another acronym. Writing a thousand words without using a single noun is easy. And of course all the short ones are overloaded. Is an AP an Application Processor or an Access Point? Depends on which subfield the person you’re talking to is from.

But they’re a necessary evil, since MSISDN is still less cumbersome than Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number.

I thought this was a wonderful example of "some things are just intrinsically challenging to represent in your brain":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZwWG1nK2fY

Apparently they've found structural differences in the brains of people undergoing London's famously difficult taxi qualification.

I think I saw a video that said people studying for "the knowledge" as it's known report massive fatigue.

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

> “But memorable names help with marketing!”

> Sure, if you’re building a consumer product. Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product. The people who will ever care about it just want to know what it does.

——

It sounds like the author doesn’t view themselves as a consumer in this relationship, that they are immune to marketing, and that what they are advocating for isn’t just another marketing tactic. I’m not sure if any of those are true.

My experience with areas that use functional names to describe things is that you end up in a sea of acronyms (the functional-based names are a mouthful!) and you end in an arguably worse situation (did you say ABDC or ADBC, those are two completely different things).

I agree. I've worked in places that discourage "cute" names and the result is often things like having to decide between using CoreMainHttp and MainHttpCore. Or worse, two things with exactly the same name, but two different APIs, with projects sometimes taking both as a dependency at the same time. Or even obsolete parts of the org chart encoded into dependency names, like "DataOrgUtils" when the "Data Org" stopped existing several reorgs ago, when our current VP was an intern and nobody else even worked here.

Without some central control of names though, even "cute" ones tend to converge on the same handful eventually: Phoenix (and other classical allusions like Plato's Cave, etc.), Keymaster/MCP (and other 80s childrens' movie references), Simpsons characters, Star {Trek,Wars} references. These are all attractors for the kind of people that tend to be in IT/SWE even if the actual namespace (all possible ASCII-expressable words) is much larger.

Exactly - the author thinks all these tools just materialized fully formed in their software ecosystem instead of surviving years of competition with other, less memorable tools. It takes many years of work, luck, and yes, marketing to get to the point where any of these tools are, and a memorable name can absolutely make the difference between support and oblivion.

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 vendetta against cute sounding names, not against the names being uselessly non-descriptive. In my opinion, the way this post is framed at the outset is misleading.

— This comment brought to you via Firefox, which obviously from its name, is a web browser.

> but to claim we have "lost the plot" while holding up names like "awk" is contradictory at best

My argument is that even a name like awk is much more relevant to the people who used this software back then, of course it was not the best way to name it, but at least it held some meaning to it. Unlike modern software, awk and others were not written with the consideration of a wide user-base in mind. Regarding whether we "lost the plot" or not, I believe that we did, because as mentioned, in the 80s there was a current of people who named software conventionally, and up to the 2010s, the names still used to hold some rational even when word-played or combined with cutey names.

> It sounds more like this person just had a personal vendetta against cute sounding names, not against the names being uselessly non-descriptive.

Not at all, I find it quite fun, just unprofessional.

Sent by replying to an automated RSS email, via msmtp (light SMTP client, which is unlike firefox, not a consumer product and its name has to do with its function).

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

>“Descriptive names are boring!”

>>Yes, and surgical instruments are boring.

I'm absolutely certain that this person has never been (awake) in a surgery suite because all of the tools people use have eponymous names.

There are a billion little grabbers that all have silly names like Adson, Allis, Babcock, Kocher etc. which are all meaningless until you just know what they are. And don't you grab the Mayo scissors when they ask for Metzenbaum. In med school we had a flashcard deck that just had a picture of the tool and what it is called on the other end.

In the end, I think the author has a point, but then doesn't really make it that well. I think using awk as a good example is a bit silly. diff is a good one though!

Or had a Kirchner pin inserted.

> There’s an odd tendency in modern software development; we’ve collectively decided that naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

I'm charmed by the lack of truth in this beautiful sentence. Top of mind for me, at least.

> Our field deserves better than a zoo of random nouns masquerading as professional nomenclature. Clarity isn’t boring, it’s respect for your users’ time and cognitive resources.

I felt a little guilty at first, I maintain a project called Wimsey (it's a data testing library but you couldn't guess that) and at work my team regularly enjoys fun/silly names.

Trying to defend myself, I was thinking about various logical responses to this article: non-descriptive names don't become out of place when a projects goals drift; descriptive names will lead to repitition; etc.

If I'm honest though, I think I just like software to have a sense, even a tiny one, of enjoyment.

The software I use everyday, like Cron (named after a greek god of time); Python (named after a comedy act) and Zellij (names after a tiling craft) all have fun, joyful names that tell me someone loved and cared about these projects when they built them.

I need to learn these tools beyond just "x does y category of thing" anyway, so I don't mind learning these names. And it makes software engineering just a bit more fun than using "unix-scheduler", "object-oriented-scripting-lang" or "terminal-display-manager".

I love working in a field where people are passionate about their craft. Stern professionalism doesn't sound like something I want to trade that for.

It's a human trait to name the things we love, that's the exact reason why pets typically have names like "cookie" and not "brown-dog-2".

Naming your library "data-testing-library" would be useful... until there's a second one at which point the specific name effectively becomes meaningless.

I always get stuck into .NET naming structure Project.Parser.Pcapng, it is great for projects, but it is utterly useless for standalone naming

Some people are passionate about being professional in the sense of doing things competently and expertly. Cuteness is inherently a mental distraction from what you really care about in the craft, which is why it appears tonally inappropriate. The desire to add some sort of cuteness is taken as an indication that the person apparently doesn’t derive enough joy from the workmanship itself. In other words, a lack of caring about and being fulfilled by the actual work, so that you need to add something “fun” on top.

Ok man, now give me a moment, I need to administer my weightloss weekly injection of L-Histidyl-2-methylalanyl-L-alpha-glutamylglycyl-L-threonyl-L-phenylalanyl-L-threonyl-L-seryl-L-alpha-aspartyl-L-valyl-L-seryl-L-seryl-L-tyrosyl-L-leucyl-L-alpha-glutamylglycyl-L-glutaminyl-L-alanyl-L-alanyl-N6-(N-(17-carboxy-1-oxoheptadecyl)-L-gamma-glutamyl-2-(2-(2-aminoethoxy)ethoxy)acetyl-2-(2-(2-aminoethoxy)ethoxy)acetyl)-L-lysyl-L-alpha-glutamyl-L-phenylalanyl-L-isoleucyl-L-alanyl-L-tryptophyl-L-leucyl-L-valyl-L-arginylglycyl-L-arginylglycine

1 for the money 2 for the green 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine

The problem with descriptive names is that they start descriptive but then become proper nouns. At a former employer in the Fortune 100 outside the software industry, everything started with a descriptive name, that then became an acronym. And as every project and tool inevitably developed its own idiosyncrasies, the descriptive name pretty soon didn't tell you anything useful about the project at all.

It is an unavoidable reality that knowing something's name gives you very, very little information about what that something is. That's what sentences are for.

Knowing mysql is a database and not a socket wrench is mildly useful but it's more important that I know whether or not it supports enums.

The military starts with a cool name, then makes an immediate backronym for launch.

If 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"

Not at all. You don't name by category, you can name by function or approach. PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL). If your "LLM wrapper" does nothing distinctive worth naming, maybe don't publish it. But if it specifically handles streaming, call it something like "llm-stream-client." If it focuses on prompt templating, "prompt-template-engine." The name encodes the actual value proposition.

I actually stated this on the post, but let me reiterate, I think that naming things in somehow fun way is totally okay as long as it stays relevant to what the tool actually does (you can have this achieved by play wording suffixes (Mongo"DB", Open"SSL", Ma"git" are good examples, all are better than elephant, dog, and beaver).

Maybe, and I would definitely prefer this to the random-generic-word practice. "illuminate" is some part of Laravel, but I can't remember what it is, just that "that's not even a noun; they just picked that word for $whatever_crappy_subsystem because it sounds nice" and being even more annoyed at the whole thing because of it.

> programming shifted from corporate mainframe work to the community builders > which is good

but then:

> Our field deserves better than a zoo of random nouns masquerading as professional nomenclature

Okay? So is this professional nomenclature or the work of community builders?

I think: everyone should code, it should not be an elitist profession, we don't need to all accommodate busy professionals, i'm fine with corporate users having to say my stupid package name at work.

> Your fun has externalities. Every person who encounters your “fun” name pays a small tax. Across the industry, these taxes compound into significant waste

Someone please get this guy a bong rip.

It’s all fun and games until you have to be like “blastoise deleted our database backups”

Nondescriptive names are not necessarily wrong or impeding. The author mentions science, yet STEM is filled with nondescriptive names: we have "Pythagorean theorem" instead of "right triangle sidelength theorem", "Newton's method" instead of "iterated tangent root-finding", "Lambda calculus" instead of "abstraction-application evaluation". Although they are not whimsical, these terms mean nothing to a first-time reader.

Oh, STEM naming… Especially mathematics. How can you tell that a "set" is different from a "group" different from a "manifold" different from a "category"? Then there is a lot of seemingly unrelated things called "space" (they are all actually a topological space, but when studying e. g. vector spaces one might not yet have been into that). "Field" is two absolutely unrelated things in physics and algebra, sometimes these domains even intersect! Linear programming, no real relation to computer programming at all, "programming" used to mean "optimization". Calling stuff after their discoverers might be non-descriptive, but giving a misleadingly descriptive name that also collides is way worse - yet people working with this manage just fine.

>http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr”

Is it though? How are you going to differentiate between 10 different variations of http-request-validator repos on GitHub? I think both have their downsides, but making the name super generic sounding is arguably worse. What I don't like about names like zephyr is that they're purely marketing-driven; people end up picking a zephyr over a http-request-validator purely because the name is sounds "cool" to them, even though http-request-validator might actually be the better library. And don't even get me started on people naming their projects random Japanese words.. it's like the equivalent of nicknames that Thai people use, which are just random English words like Ice Cream or Thank You.

Maybe the happy medium is, like you said, names that contain a hint as to what they do, like Actix (actor model). But TBH you kind of still have to look it up to know what it does, there's no way you're just going to infer that. Maybe later on it helps you remember what it was for though.

> don't even get me started on people naming their projects random Japanese words

But words help us learn. How many times do you notice a connection between some word from your childhood and an adult concept or place? And they're not random, people choose things because of many hidden reasons, but random is rarely the case.

Many of us love the story behind a word - as shown by many of the comments here reflecting on the cultural history behind our tool names.

I worked in finance – we gave our models names that endeared us to them. My favorite is a coworker naming his model "beefhammer".

Yeah, 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.

I think if a project name is easily googleable, it's a good name. If I see "generic-tool-name failed" in the logs and can't immediately find what that thing even is, because I get lots of irrelevant search results, it's a bad name. This can happen with both descriptive and cutesy names.

Its interesting how early programming languages are mentioned as having proper names. In the 60s we went from BCPL to B to C. B and C are not descriptive at all. Should they have been named "operating systems language" or "portable Unix language" instead? I also fail to see how AWK is a well named tool according to these metrics. The initials of the creators dont tell you anything about what it actually is or does.

I had to discover this myself. when I first started working on personal projects on my PC, I'd give each of them some whimsical name, usually a pun or play on a quote from a tv show or song lyric. then in a few months time I'd come looking for the project and have to spend five minutes scrolling through a bunch of esoteric word formations and random half sentences trying to remember what whimsical mood I was in when I made the project. now I just name everything whatever I think I'm most likely to remember in 3 months. I do find it a little sad, losing some creativity and colour, so maybe one day I'll make a tag/shadow title system so I don't need directly descriptive names

That 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

When I told a co-worker about https://pypi.org/project/voluptuous/ he immediately searched for the name alone, got really wide-eyed and closed the tab, then told us not to do the same.

I asked to have LaTeX installed at one site, several years ago. The first Google results were eye-opening.

What was the first result? Mine is Rakuten Viki, a streaming service focused on Asian dramas that aren’t like what you described.

I strongly disagree with this: calling your thing that serves webhooks “webhooks” or “webhook-service” sounds nice and neat when you’re looking in a repo list but you immediately impose a tax on everyone in the org: now everyone in a conversation has to distinguish between “webhooks” as the proper name of a particular service and “webhooks” as the name of a particular pattern. Multiply this by all the various components of a modern software ecosystem, and you turn your companies infrastructure into a private language piecemeal and, what’s worse, it’s a private languages outsiders and newcomers think they understand and so they often take much longer to discover what the actual services are.

> "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".

But before those silly names came up, every company used their own three letter abbrevations for their tooling, which was not much better. They had descriptive names, but using the abbrevations only didn't help, and you needed a company wide dictionary. Like "We’re using CMT2 for configuration management, which feeds into CCM for the CLI, and then WSM handles our WebSocket connections, PM manages permissions, all through AJQ for our job queue."

"First we have to build a Bingo service. See, Bingo knows everyone's name-o..."

- 'Microservices' sketch by Krazam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

You can really track the progression of Krazam's career based on what videos he puts out

You will never understand Galactus' pain

If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?

Based on the article headlines I've seen over the years, I don't think emacs users know what emacs does except "yes"

Maybe a geekbench from yesteryear. Back in the mists of time it was apocryphally known as "eight megs and continually swapping". But I guess that's a couple of orders of magnitude out nowadays.

It's still to his point:

> Even when engineers get creative, there’s logic: a butterfly valve actually looks like butterfly wings. You can tell how the name relates to what it actually defines, and how it can be memorable.

Editor MACroS still has a logic. It isn't just random.

I still think of the short-lived Apple eMac when I read it.

Uses eight megs of RAM and constantly swaps?

Constantly Swapping its Eight Megabytes, of course.

https://google.com/search?q=Eight+Megabytes++And+Constantly+...

An emergency bootable/rescue tool for Macs!

If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called a "combine" does?

Combine things? Nope. Its purpose is to separate things...

Its not just the software industry.

> If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?

Hmm, this looks like a nonsense word, but sometimes words look like nonsense when you write them backwards, maybe it's a scame?

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.

I used GIMP before I ever used Photoshop. My experience was the opposite. I think that means the UIs are different, but there is no one that is objectively better, it's just a matter of what your expectations are, which are set by whatever you learned first.

As for CMYK support: why do designers even need to use this? Sure, not every RGB is the same, and it took some while before we even got sRGB as some standard, but the same goes for CMYK: every printer has its own profile. I had the displeasure of trying to get the CMYK profile of a "professional" printing company that only accepted files in CMYK, and they didn't even know which profile their printers used. Ideally you would send a RGB file including the display profile your screen uses, and then the printing facility converts that to whatever CMYK they need.

Of course there are also special colors or effects outside of RGB/CMYK that you might want to use when printing something, that's something else.

GIMP has god horrid UX, there's no way it could have eaten Adobes anything. There's lineage of FOSS apps that stick by the "we're not X, we're different from X." mantra.

The discomfort, frustration and unintuitiveness you're feeling from using our app? It's just you!

No, that's not bad design and bad UX! its simply because we are different! We aren't X (Photoshop), we just do things differently here!".

GIMP is quintessential example of this.

I agree GIMP is a bad name, but is it really a 'solid' competitor to Photoshop? My impression has been that it was never close to being competitive on features. I've only used either of them very briefly so I may be wildly wrong though.

Agreed. Also, that fu king mascot, Wilber?, that chihuahua looking thing didn't help normies without a sense of whimsy take it serious.

It really conveyed the image of cheap and shoddy. The drab looking logos, the name, and the weird looking poodle: all that just made it harder to take serious.

> which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.

That "perhaps" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence. GIMP has never, even now, been a serious competitor to Adobe's products for professionals. To suggest that if they simply had a better name they would be the top dog is laughable.

Wait until you learn about Git. ;)

I think the author is ignoring the difference between Branding and several other categories, like technical terms and their common names.

The adjustable wrench is named straightforwardly, but most English speakers know it as the monkey wrench. In some European languages its name translates to "French wrench" or "the French" (as in: French person), in others it's "English wrench" even though those two were originally just variants of the adjustable wrench.

Point is, all those goofy names are brands that may or may not stick around for longer and the terms for what they actually do are more descriptive.

My favourite example: BlueJeans. A videoconferencing platform. Why is it named like that? We might never know, but most likely partly to stand out, but there's a clear distinction between the brand name and the more descriptive terms used to tell what it does.

Unfortunately this article misses the worst failure of naming: name collisions.

Yeah, if we followed this advice every language would have four different packages named http-client.

“Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.”

— <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poob-has-it-for-you>

> The next time you’re about to name your project after your favorite anime character, pause. Ask yourself: “Would a civil engineer name a bridge support system this way?” If the answer is no, choose a better name.

I'm creating a dotfiles to remote SSH session tool in shell. At first, I wanted to call it "sship", but that name was already taken. Something like "ssh-dotfiles-carrier" felt too long for a command, and abbreviating it to "sdc" would lose the meaning.

So yes, I eventually named it "shitt-p" (character of Hitman Reborn!), since I wanted it to relate to "sh"...

My old company Canva, was pretty good about this and I'm bringing that to the culture at my current place.

Krazam has excellently parodied this unserious naming indulgence of programmers[1]. "See, Bingo knows everyone's name-O. So we get the user ID from there." Racoon, Wingman, EKS (Entropy Chaos Service), RGS, Barbie Doll, Ringo-2.

1. https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ?si=QkI-TPStI9I4RtAB&t=33

Descriptive names are great until the thing you built starts evolving and doing more or less than the description and then is way more confusing that calling something somewhat general like my favorite of all time: 'Conformity Beaver'. The same goes for teams. Mythical creatures are good because they are fun and also allow the team to evolve its mandate and custodianship and may also help with Conways Law.

To be honest, `awk` that the author references to as a good name, is not. It's just the initials of authors, which does not convey anything about what the tool does. It's yet another cognitive tax.

And I would go further, the extremely shortened names in Linux and other places is problematic too, given that most terminals now allow name completion on tab.

Now? Tab completion has been a thing for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_completion

Tab completion being a thing does not take away from short, memorable names being easier to use. You'd likely end up typing more on average, due to multiple programs sharing the first few letters of their name

Why is Go a very silly name and not Python, C, Rust, or literally any programming language name?

COBOL. Now there's a sensible name.

The article mentions that things were fine until around 2010 when developers collectively lost their minds. So what’s special about 2010?

It’s about that time that everything needed a website with a domain and all the domains were gobbled up by squatters. Also people were inventing new words looking for the fewest possible syllables for SEO and marketing.

I really gotta hand it to "wget" for picking a good name for a program that gets things from the web.

>> Early programming languages followed similar logic: FORTRAN (Formula Translation), COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), SQL (Structured Query Language), I believe Lisp stands for list processing. The pattern was clear: names conveyed purpose or origin.

"names conveyed purpose or origin.": no they don't. If I use the authors example of the two people talking: as if saying "BASIC" instead of "Cobra" explained the meaning anything better to a person who never used BASIC.

I've been programming for 15 years+ and never used basic due to my age and I never know, until today, that BASIC stands for "Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code".

Why? Because I don't need to know and it doesn't make the usage of BASIC anything different.

The author should read up on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein or maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface both of which are actually scientifically important things.

Amiga famously had a custom ASIC called "Fat Gary" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_custom_chips

I really could go on about this. Names are only useful for distinct identification. They need to be distinct within their domain. Otherwise they're just an index into a list.

Sonic hedgehog is a terrible example this case. Researchers literally had to tell parents their children had mutations in the "sonic hedgehog gene." The scientific community recognized this was a problem and it's a widely-known controversy. It's cited as an example of bad naming in medical ethics discussions.

Boaty McBoatface? officials overrode the vote to name it after David Attenborough. The actual research submarine got the joke name. Again, this proves my point.

Fat Gary was an internal chip designation that never needed to be public-facing. Perfectly fine.

"Names are only for distinct identification" if efficiency was not at a question. Why use worse identifiers when better ones cost the same?

End of the day you know what it means or you don't. I agree it's helpful when a name is descriptive, but there's no helping the fact that you're going to have to learn the names of things that aren't obvious. Purely utilitarian names would constantly collide.

I also think they overestimate how distinct terminology is in other fields. Even their example of the I-beam is also known as an H beam or an RSJ depending on who you're talking to. I don't find it hard to imagine a mechanic referring to one of their specialty tools by the name of its manufacturer, either.

Regardless, the battle was lost before it started. There has never been good consistent descriptive naming as standard in computing; there was no plot to lose.

We should all copy from the Haskell community. Instead of coming up with a random name like "append" for a List function, we should appeal to our deep intuition of monoids and use the much more intuitive "<>".

And forty years ago, I was using a tool called Brief, which was a product from UnderWare. I was also using a librarian named Marian.

Robert Preston, is that you?

Just name everything Phoenix.

(The joke here is: look up how many _major_ software projects have been named Phoenix at some point. It's a lot.)

Yes. If someone complains, just rename it to Firebird.

"Gemini" seems to be the modern Phoenix

Yep. Just did a reimage update to Fedora 43, got errors about 'ptyxis' in some shell scripts. Wat (wipes desk and keyboard)?

Oh, it's the graphical terminal program (alternative to 'gnome-terminal'). Well, um, ok.

However, I will concede, after more digging as to why (as it rankled), that there was a "have to choose a unique name" issue there (even leaving aside trademark issues). I'm resigned (so I suppose signed up) to deal with residual issues that crop up going forward.

I love to mock '*ly.com' names for almost certainly doomed enterprises, but I get that at least it wasn't already taken.

pty is a Pseudo TeletYpe (aka, terminal emulator). It's 50-year-old word.

ptyxis is a word based on the 'pty' base, because it's not the only pty program.

It's a nearly-unique name, which is very good for the task of "discovering what it is".

It’s a solid terminal, but could they have chosen a worse name?

Just love of whimsy is part of it, not denying it. But other parts of it are that a generation or two on, a lot of the straightforward names are taken.

(Also, I wouldn't say `awk` or even `grep` are good examples (as the OP admits) -- they were definitely chosen for whimsky, with, if not actually backronyms, still acronyms deisgned for whimsy).

And another part of it is that so many people now have dreams of commercializing their product, so you need a "brand" name. (I guarantee the namers of the tools had no designs on commecializing grep or awk). (I have little sympathy for this one, but it's the world).

I do agree with OP it is a problem for accessibility. Newcomers who haven't already memorized the mangagerie have a lot to figure out; some people's brains work differently than others and it's easier or harder for some people to remember these arbitrary names naturally; I'd guess it can be especially hard for non-native English speakers, but maybe it's all Greek (ha!) to them anyway, so.

When i have tried to name things plain though, I often have trouble -- we want something clear, but also relatively short (especially if it's going to be in namespace or other identifier names and be typed a lot!) -- and not already taken in popular consciousness or the package managers we'll need etc, and often I have trouble finding such!

> There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

> -- Phil Karlton

- https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/19836/has-phil-...

- https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html

>There’s an odd tendency in modern software development; we’ve collectively decided that naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

Odd? Modern? I started working professionally in 2005 and everything had silly names. The DNS server was named athena instead of c302r5s1 or whatever building/room/rack/position name. I once rebooted a server that had an uptime of 12 years, so it had been running since 1993... it indeed had a silly name. Everything had silly names, usually types of things had a theme.

>Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering, where people there maintain even stricter discipline. IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. 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.

How about piranha? aqua regia? Up/Down/Strange/Charm quarks? Gluons? Like a third of the elements named after people or places.

Curium, Einsteinium, Fermium, Mendelevium, Nobelium, Lawrencium, Rutherfordium, Seaborgium, Bohrium, Meitnerium, Roentgenium, Copernicium, Flerovium, Oganesson -- I guess none of these people were named Steve, but you get the point

These tendencies are OLD and EVERYWHERE. IUPAC names are just a convenient way to serialize data.

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.

---

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.

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.

> Early programming languages followed similar logic: FORTRAN (Formula Translation), COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), SQL (Structured Query Language), I believe Lisp stands for list processing. The pattern was clear: names conveyed purpose or origin.

Yes and no. The Navy has or had a lot of code in JOVIAL, Jules's Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language. SNOBOL goes a long way back.

> IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. 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.

Well if they work for a drug company they will say “Let’s call this phlogistotheremone but sell it under the name Zyphyrax so that doctors and patients will refer to the same medication by different names.”

One issue with package naming is competition. One of the great things about OSS or software in general is people can take inspiration from other projects that do the same thing. Personally I've ran into deciding which casting library to use

- runtypes - https://github.com/runtypes/runtypes

- zod - https://zod.dev/

- ajv - https://ajv.js.org/

AJV and runtypes use the naming convention that the article suggestions. It's named is derived from how it's used. Zod on the other hand seems to come from left field.

Personally, I built a simple caster called "ShallowCaster" before choosing to move to a library as things got move complex but I think a problem is that as competition increases the "generic" naming becomes more difficult to find.

I suppose an option is to include the author name for each package such as "json casting from google" or "@google/json-casting" this way all packages can use the descriptive naming while not conflicting

A bit tangential but I was going to make a post of my own on naming with the problem of "filenames"

so many times I download something and the filename has nothing to do with the file or it's too much of an abbreviation so when I go to look for the file it's hard to find or if I come across one of these files I have no idea what it actually contains

Great post and I think this extends to machine learning names, although not that severe. Maybe it all started with Adam. When I say “I used Adam for optimization” this means I used a random opaque thing for optimization. If I say “I used an ADAptive Moment estimation based optimizer” it becomes more transparent. Using human names or random nouns has been a trend. Lora, Sora, Dora, Bert, Bart, Robert, Roberta, Dall-e, Dino, Sam… With varying capitalization for each letter. Even the Transformer. What does it transform exactly? But it gets worse. Here is a list of architectures that may replace Transformers [0]: Linformer, Longformer, Reformer, Performer, Griffin, BigBird, Mamba, Jamba... What’s going on?

[0]https://huggingface.co/blog/ProCreations/transformers-are-ge...

We had this debate at my company and the end result was a ban on “random” service names.

So we ended up with “auth service” instead of something like “Galactus”. The problem of course is that “auth service” isn’t searchable in our monorepo and it was a nightmare to find or discuss any info or references to the service itself. Now imagine if docker was called “container manager”. Good luck googling that and disentangling it from all the search results.

The value of a name doesn’t come from it being self-explanatory but rather from it being a pseudo-unique identifier. The small cognitive tax of remembering it serves as a shared bookmark between people that you can refer to when discussing or speaking to others about it - whether we’re talking about docker, Linux, or another person.

It's especially fun once the service is superseded. Guess which one of these services handles MAC address allocation and storage: macaddr_db or atom-util?

Worse is the Git UI, where random English words that seem to have a clear meaning in the context of source control don't do at all what you think they do, or five different things, or are really just a bunch of other commands wrapped together for less typing (like "pull").

I would rather have fantasy names than wrong names.

> http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr” when someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.

The "Zephyr" that I knew about was a notification system for workstation clusters on a LAN, written at the MIT Athena project. You'd announce something on it, and the info would spread through the network as if by a gentle breeze. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)

I do recall there was an experimental study in the 1980s (Hartwell, Landauer, and Gigliotti iirc) showing that this naming stuff doesn't matter. This exact same debate was going on back then. The study refuted Don Norman's "The Truth about Unix" paper which claimed that Unix commands ("rm", "mv", etc.) were too hard to remember.

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 slugs / and so on. As well as names that are a hybrid of creative and descriptive. Sqlalchemy is a good example.

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?

It could be extended to package managers as well. E.g “pip whatisthis foo_baz”.

Shit we should create this…

The real trick is getting just enough meaning into the name to be helpful, while keeping it distinct. SQLAlchemy is a great example.

I called by zsh bookmark tool `tutu`, my idea was to make it sound like what it does.

- It helps you go TO places - The main command is `tu` because it is short, a homophone of "to", and wasn't already taken - Additional commands `tutu` (which does a `pushd` instead of `cd`) and `untu` (which is just a wrapper around `popd`) are short, memorable, and pronouncable.

All of those naming decisions were made with ergonomics in mind.

Was I successful? I like it. A few other people are using it and seem to like it, too.

To the extent that I was, I think it's because the name is meaningful enough while remaining distinct.

https://github.com/daotoad/tutu

> 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?

This might not be exactly what you mean by a CLI app called "whatisthis", but I have been using cheat.sh and the pattern below for a few years. It works really well!

curl cheat.sh/grep # fetches brief grep cheat sheet

Past projects of mine.

    'pedes
    Glook
    Fitznik
    Plops
    Gyralight
    I wanted a new tower defence game: So I made one

Oh and https://lerc.itch.io/namesarehardpart5

The examples given for real world things The Golden Gate Bridge and The Hoover Dam, are instances of things. Things that the class of which they belong is old enough that Dam and Bridge are not new words.

If you are making new things you need a new name. Software is inherently new because computers have been in wide use for only a few decades. Instances of software rarely even get names, just numbers, with project names or nicknames attached. I'd be willing to bet both The Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover dam had project names or nicknames.

The author isn’t comparing apples with apples.

“Butterfly valve” is the name for a type of widget.

There are many instances of “butterfly valve”, some of which will have strange brand names.

Just like there are many “web frameworks”, each with weird and wonderful names (“Django”, “Rails”, “Spring” etc.)

We’re really not that different.

> 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

I agree with the sentiment, though the argument could be made better. It’s not really about good names being descriptive, nor about memorable mnemonics. It’s that modern naming styles tend to overload random English words for no good reason, but just to be cute (which I don’t consider a good reason) or to be evocative of something which it isn’t. One issue with that is that you might have very different connotations evoked by the word, that clashes with the software. And conversely, if you have to use the software regularly, it now encroaches into the semantic space of what you otherwise associate with the word. I’d like my software, and hence its name, to be its own thing, thank you very much.

it's kafkaesque

I'm not sure arguing in favor of alphabet soup naming is any better. At least we ended up with semantic versioning, because originally it had also been just an expression of marketing and creativity. I don't understand even slightly why he blames Google in the article. He also forgot to propose what he believes Google should have been named. Search Engine? AWCSS? And the fact that he'd be fine with Viper and Cobra if they had backronyms points to the ridiculousness of the whole article. I'm genuinely most fascinated by how he accomplished writing that much text without the nonsense of his position dawning on him.

> Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering, where people there maintain even stricter discipline. IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. 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.

This so isn't important, but this just isn't true at least in chemistry. Plenty of molecules have names that aren't IUPAC based, but instead are based on prefixes/suffixes that are common to the field (more in pharmacological chemistry but not just!)

https://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm

And don't isomers share their name? And isotopes don't change the name either, I think?

What is it with a number of blogs recently that have turned off normal right-click behavior, and probably related, the scroll behavior is awful.

This is one, and as soon as I scroll on my work high powered Macbook and it's not smooth, I'm out.

[OP] Can you please doublecheck? Nothing should affect right-click behavior or scroll, if you're experiencing it, it's probably from your end.

I am more frustrated by the fact browsers allow such manipulation such as this and some clipboard operations.

are you guys naming your products?

We have an internal name and our product name. Internal names start as something that describes the project/repo/tool. Then within 18 months the name no longer makes sense so we rename it to some random name - state names, lake names, presidents, mountains, etc. It's just a placeholder.

The public facing product name is a compromise of marketing, trademark, and what gets approved by the CEO. Even the company name might change in startup world. No joke: the startup next door had to change their name because it was too masculine, and they realized more than half their projected market was women.

This is the way, you name things random words devoid of all connection to software because you don't want to confuse people later when the scope grows or changes.

Well so in the beginning we only supported email notifications which is why it's called EmailServ but over time it grew into a robust and pretty general queueing service so now it handles all our background task processing. Sending emails is actually handled by EmailWorker but EmailServ still supports its original API which now uses EmailWorker behind the scenes if you prefer that.

As they say in physics: color and charm may change, but up and down are forever.

I believe the phrase I'm looking for is hallelujah!

The naming culture is beyond salvation. It crossed the line when things went from 'We invented this word to name our thing.' to 'We fused the concept of breakfast muffins in cat pictures meme to the previous application of the open source tool to name our abstract thing more accurately. That's why it's called 7Mermaids.'

I remember when Yahoo had to spend a fortune on commercials asking "Do you Yahoo?!" It seems that old business lesson was completely forgotten.

I noticed this with companies first, though at least it always made some sort of sense that a meaningless name would make it easier to pivot.

If your name is "The Database Company", but at some point find you'd rather do Blockchain and then later AI, the name might be an obstacle.

If you call yourself "Gworp" in the first place, you'll have no such problem.

(Though in not sure if "Mt Gox" aka "Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange" would be a positive or negative example for that)

Mt. Gox is a name change done after the fact, it's just reinterpreting the original initials.

> 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

Would it be better if it was this:

> We’re using ConfigurationManager for configuration management, which feeds into CLI for the CLI, and then WebSocketHandler handles our WebSocket connections, PermissionManager manages permissions, all through JobQueue for our job queue

I think the author makes the opposite point of intended)

the problem with technical software names is that they are either too long, too pointless, do not die when underlying tool goes through re-incarnation(looking at you angular) or worse, too important to be wasted on a lesser quality project (looking at you react-router).

in my company, we have a tool whose technical name was four word long, and has just as much cognitive load as any technical name.

one of my biggest contribution to that project was to Name it.i gave it a simple name, with zero relation to tech or any software

and suddenly our PMs, Managers, Users can pronounce it and can actually type it correctly and of course recall it's name flawlessly.

so, at least from my experience, having a small, easy to pronounce name is more important than having technical name.

Moreover having a name with all of the qualities is definitely desirable, but there are many projects in world and not that great names. and many Great names (looking at you, Vue.js) are either already taken or beyond my naming skills

The cognitive tax is a real problem. Using random cutesy names, there is no obvious behavior boundary. Does authentication go in the SnufBux module? Or the Farfrumstable service? Who knows? Without obvious language clues to handle a new concept, any new functionality will get strewn across these internal boundaries. And why not - they have zero semantic meaning anyway! Sloppy names encourage sloppy programming.

And you've spotted why normal, regular, simple, natural, real mathematics is so hard for people to grok at first glance.

That is one thing i like about the Julia package ecosystem. The general Registry (where package metadata is stored and where you go to register a new package), recommends using explicit names over short acronyms. For example, DifferentialEquations.jl is a package that does differential equations in julia (recognizable via the .jl suffix). What does Garlic.jl do? Exactly, garlic (the vegetable) modelling.

Does Julia registry have active moderation? Otherwise I'd expect to see 99 different variations of DifferentialEquations.jl

I believe one of the things that prompted stallman to give that talk was the inclusion of the lsp client "eglot" in emacs. Eglot i think is short for emacs polyglot.

The most idiomatic name, lsp-mode, was taken by another package. Stallman wanted to find another name but no one seemed to care as much as he did. I think one name he suggested in its place at one point was "code-parse" or something like that.

I agree, some names that come to mind are Celery and Windows. But there are always silly names. I like Plan 9, an OS named after an Ed Wood B movie. Its sibling, Inferno is full of puns and references to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Its corporate dullards who insist that neutral boring is appealing to most and I again agree but its not a hard rule for me.

I read an article linked on HN once (can't remember what it was) that recommended giving totally meaningless names to monoliths. The point being that one should not use the name as a crutch to decide what should or should not go in the service.

So at my last job, we called our monolith anubis. It always brought joy when someone asked for an explanation.

This essay is not consistent. They ramble between company names Google ( which is a great name ) and tools like AWK which is not descriptive at all but a good name.

But I do share his pain with onboarding when I joined Humungous Entertainment the tools or systems were called Sputm, Phlegm, Mucus, SPIT. There might have been a Bile. :-)

Have a Stoolap https://github.com/stoolap/stoolap

A lot of the issue has to do with marketing. Some people name their tool for the pizazz it might generate and gain them fame or it's an actual company motivation. Instead of a hammer is a hammer and a heavy hammer should be named "heavy_hammer".

EDIT: I just noticed that the marketing angle is mentioned in the article.

Why does it have to be all or nothing? How about a clever name or two for marketing that stands out and doesn't get lost in a sentence "I'm not asking you to search, I'm asking you to use the search command" but not obnoxiously over done where everything is named after some Norse god or some other silliness.

Forget about tools, in most part of the world, the name programmer and software developers like to call themselves namely software engineer is not even considered part of engineering professions.

That's why you find most of software engineering department in Computer Science Faculty or School, not in the Faculty of Engineering.

Why does nobody in SF say "I am going via the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge", but shortens it to just the "Bay Bridge"? This is the reason some bridges get a nice name (like Golden Gate), and some are strictly utilitarian (like SF-Oakland Bay).

And I am sure there are other "Bay Bridges" in the world too.

I have developed a language for writing structured queries. Based on this article, I have decided to call it SQL.

Calling it Sequel would have been made it easier to pronounce. I think I'll just pronounce it that way in my mind.

I think there should be some kind of a tax or a fine for anyone who comes up or even suggests a new acronym. Regardless of the field. While I do agree with the article on some level, I still think even a randomly picked word from the dictionary is better than YAA (Yet Another Acronym).

There is a place I agree with this: human anatomy. I find eileiter/oviduct superior to Fallopian tube.

How do conference-room names fare in this view? My current company names them after football teams or local landmarks. But I heard about someone who used to work somewhere that named theirs after WWII battles, which was awkward for the Japanese guy they interviewed in one of them.

The two hardest things in software engineering: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Thete is no way to give descriptive names unless it is a single centralized system. Names need to be consistent, this is the main requirement for a good set of names. When the whole set is consistent, individual names can be nearly arbitrary, it won't matter much.

There are many different tools that attempt to solve the same problem, with varying levels of competency.

They can't all use the same name. If you want to build a better alternative to an existing solution, you need to choose a different name, this leads to names being arbitrary.

I am highly sympathetic to this sentiment, but I think it's hard to name things in software because a) it's easy for the obvious names to get overloaded and b) many of the things we are dealing with are basically abstract relationships with arbitrary properties.

There was never a plot to follow; if there isn't a better name for an editor than "vi" (because "ed" is already taken) then maybe they should try getting rid of verbs too to give it more "refreshed" branding.

No, the editor is "ex" (for extended ed…) and "vi" is it's other face… (when you call vi, it’s same as calling ex then issuing :visual command…)

I just want an editor! Not a "viitor". Not an "emacsitor". Those aren't even words!!!

Imagine calling your firm "Commerical Firm". Would this even be allowed?

This drives me crazy because I use dmenu to launch things, and every time I want to launch a subsonic client I'm like "blueberry? Wayshin... Weish... Fei... FEISHIN!"

Just call it "subsonicfeishin" or something at least!

"Chatgpt... Mc... CODEX!"

It's nuts.

Codenames are good identifiers when lots of projects exist. There are more software projects now than EVER.

I welcome Splorg, Chizzel, Rapunzel, Brap, Titoid, and Chungus - I don't care as long as it's good.

Descriptive naming absolutely helps at first contact, especially when you’re scanning a dependency list or onboarding someone new. No argument there. But in practice, names stop carrying meaning pretty quickly anyway

Love this:

> Name your library after what it does. Use compound terms. Embrace verbosity if necessary. http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr” when someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.

> The cognitive tax

> Every obscure name is a transaction cost levied on every developer who encounters it.

It’s not a mental burden, it’s a cognitive tax. Moreover it’s a transaction cost? Levied on people? Which loads their RAM?

Where’s the simple everyday English?

Anyway. We used MongoDB for a good while.

And the species of flies "Phthiria relativitae" was named as a pun on "Theory of relativity" and "Reissa roni" after "Rice-A-Roni".

RMS, of GNU's not Unix fame, has opinions on proper naming?

I can't call my new formula translation language FORTRAN because it's been taken, as have many other names. So now to avoid collisions, it's named after my cat.

FIVETRAN is a weird name for a cat, but I guess it prevents mix-ups at the vet.

I like good old names like the foobar2000 audio player. Iconic.

- Starts with lowercase.

- Means nothing.

- Good player.

https://www.foobar2000.org/

I almost completely disagree with this post. The only thing I can consider that you should probably avoid embarrassing names.

A descriptive name is terrible if you're slightly off. Or if the library gets repurposed. Or if the project doesn't turn out how you expected but it's still helpful. With everything going on, a nonsense name forces people to learn about it instead of having them guess at it from a three word description that might be misleading.

The author probably never had a project where something got named the oscilloscope-controller but there's no oscilloscope in sight, but we used to have one and then we tweaked a few things and now it runs something else and but the name was everywhere.

And all of these are abstract concepts. Getting data from point A to point B. FIFO? It's an acronym. Pipe? Doesn't really suggest it can buffer data. Buffer? Queue? Both sound like they might slow down data. Precise technical names would be good, but then the chances the purpose changes goes up!

I'd prefer developers make up names for their project to make it easier to search, or at least use a very uncommon word. Gradle is a good example.

I strongly agree with this. And what bothers me more than obscure or meaningless names like Viper are silly and embarrassing names like Hunchentoot. Names like that sometimes cause people to dismiss good software. It’s like using Comic Sans in a serious research paper.

One area of the sciences does partly use names like this, and that is biology. Biologists do sometimes name a species after a famous person, as in the louse Strigiphilus garylarsoni:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigiphilus_garylarsoni

I agree. One recent example is in the Zig community a popular tool for benchmarking is "poop" [1] (Performance Optimizer Observation Platform). It could have easily been "pop" (Performance Observation Platform) and been cute enough without being intentionally cringe. Every time I see Zig now I think about "poop".

[1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/poop

Worst example: homebrew nomenclature

Typical docs sentence:

> What does “keg-only” mean? It means the formula is installed only into the Cellar and is not linked into the default prefix.

Even for consumer products - I'd rather have Mozilla Mail and Microsoft Mail instead of Outlook and Thunderbird. But marketing must market, dammit.

Might as well just name it after the last name of the author. Like how physics has the Maxwell equations, we’d have the Torvalds Operating System.

By the author's standard, macOS and iOS has some pretty much perfect program names, I suppose:

App Store, Mail, Photos, Music, Books, Podcasts etc.

I do like their straightforwardness actually.

I was just discussing this today funny enough. How long until someone goes for broke and just names their app "peepee poopoo"?

R followed the long standing tradition of being one letter off as it was derived from S. And its creators were Robert & Ross.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

I think it's because if you always used a descriptive name you'd end up with multiple tools with the same name.

My favorite - "Tech without an interesting name (TWAIN)" for scanner/ imaging drivers from the 90s.

Fun party game: Ask people if they know ChatGPT. When they inevitably say "yes", ask what GPT stands for.

By this standard, ChatGPT is an excellent name: it's a generative pre-trained transformer that chats with you.

The two hardest things to do in computer science is knowing when to invalidate cache and how to name things.

And off-by-one errors.

It's literally just as hard to name things descriptively as it is to name them cutely.

First it was racehorses. Then it was prescription medications. Then software.

I hope this goes no further.

The craft beer names though.

Idk about open source tools, but internal corporate things have codenames for good reasons.

Im jealous of people able to write multi-paragraph text for such a simple thought.

- VTL-O2

- Forth

- Grep

- CVS (I'm not an American but you can relate)

- Clang

Altough MS products can be as opaque if not more. And let's not talk about IBM...

I'm happy to see this post, it's something that bugs me every time I have to learn a new tool with a name that's neither A. unique to the project AND B. doesn't describe the project.

For example Zola and Hugo, static site generators - great, unique words that has no other meaning to me but the generator. The only other Hugo I know is a character in Bob's Burgers. But choosing random dictionary words like Avocado or Spice or whatever makes it completely transparent against my existing knowledge and now I have the mental lookup issue the author describes.

The other day a HN user was commenting "NAT, aka IP masquerading... (proceeds to keep re-using the term)". IME no one in the industry says "IP masquerading" unless your entire org and vendors are on Linux. Just call it NAT, we know what you mean. This a Linuxism and should be avoided!

Let's hit up Britannica.com on the word:

> a party at which people wear masks and often costumes

> a way of appearing or behaving that is not true or real

> to pretend to be someone or something else

I guess? I guess we are "pretending to be the peer IP when actually we are the LAN IP". But to me it's just nonsense. It's capital T Translating one IP to another for the sake of routing, drop the weird social implications.

> The only other Hugo I know is a character in Bob's Burgers.

Really? It's a very common name, including certain Victor and Boss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_(name)

> Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product.

I'm not sure how the author came to this conclusion.

At any rate, programmers aren't any worse about this than mathematicians. Just replace [fictional name] with some foreign word or philosophical term that's justified with the most insane mental gymnastics you've ever heard of. Given some historical native speaker of Latin, do you think they're going to know what a matrix is for? No, because the word means "uterus". There is no connection to "tabular shorthand of linear transformations."

I think it's clear the author is writing this to vent frustration, but I think they've misidentified the actual problem:

> http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr” when someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.

My jaw hit the floor reading this. The idea there are people out there debugging codebases without knowing something as foundational as the dependencies is beyond absurd to me. That's insane and horrifying, overshadowing pretty much the entire blog post. Does anyone else live like this? How do you tolerate these conditions? Why would you tolerate these conditions?

I remember a trend of randomly dropping vowels started with flickr.

Genes and species are also sometimes given ridiculous names.

I still think ICQ was the greatest application name ever.

I like to mock the current meta as being coca cola driven.

> Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering, where people there maintain even stricter discipline. IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. 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.

Ummmmm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_compounds_wit...

"You sure 'bout dat? You sure 'bout dat?"

My favorite: there's a protein called "sonic hedgehog" that's essential to animal embryonic development. (All of the "hedgehog" family proteins would cause fruit flies to take on a spiky appearance when mutated, hence the name.) When chemists synthesized a drug that suppresses SHH protein's action, they named it "robotnikinin".

The Drosophila people had the best naming schemes. I really wish we kept up the whimsy of gene names. One I enjoy is RING; "really interesting new gene". I have always said if I find a gene of interest, I'd call it RUNG.

"windowpane" was my first thought :) such a lovely play on the "-ane" suffix

I find the remark that we give things names more as a word play than purpose.... kind of amusing? Like, of course people will find a way to play with the tools they have. And in programming, that is often words. Because what else would it be?

By far the worst aspect of the nerd ecosystem is the odd belief that pops up every so often that names should matter. In every ecosystem, there is usually some odd idea that it is only in their world that people abuse this.

Just skim through that list of things that are unexpectedly named after people. Sure, you can get upset about Shell's sort not having any relation to shells. Or Bloom's filter not having a phase where the data "blooms" into use. But you would have the same issue with French drains. Or how gaslighting has nothing to do with lighting things on fire using gas and the affect that will have.

Honestly, I think this would be a fun list to just keep going. Akin to the old Chuck Norris joke generators.

Is fun not allowed anymore? In the past 3 days I've seen posts and comments on HN saying that:

- everything in interfaces should be useful, decorative icons are bad

- presentation slides should not use animations

- now fun name are forbidden too apparently

What the fuck?

> No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name

Do you want to enter the discussion on how physicists named quarks?

- Almost everything on blogs and HN are opinions, so don't take things things too seriously

- Fun and humour are subjective, and a substantial part derives from novelty and subvertin expectations. It's hard to make something fun for an audience that has already seen such dozens of times.

- The audience('s background and expectations) is diverse and varies with time. So what's considered "fun" is audience specific and often cyclical.

the whole post/topic has amazing engagement farming potential

the correct response should be the "that's bait" GIF/meme (from the aptly namee Fury Road documentary)

https://imgur.com/gallery/thats-bait-FOwZ77O

> naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

Really? Have you specced a microprocessor lately? Seen what pharmaceuticals are called? How polymer compound materials get named?

The "Raptor Lake" codename in microprocessors is internal, the product ships with systematic designation. Engineers spec chips by model numbers that encode generation, tier, and performance class.

In Pharmaceuticals, Doctors prescribe "sildenafil," not "Viagra." The generic name describes chemical structure. Brand names are marketing for consumers, not professional nomenclature.

Mythology in chemistry/astronomy has centuries of legacy and connects to human cultural history. Calling an element "Titanium" after Titans carries weight. Calling a SQL replicator "Marmot" connects to... what, exactly? A weekend at the zoo?

Brand name pharmaceuticals are sort of a different thing. Brand names must comply with the naming guidelines of the FDA, European Medicines Agency, and HealthCanda simultaneously. In practice, this makes it tricky to use actual words. So my companies adopt an 'empty vessel' naming approach. The empty vessels are nonsense words that (1) invoke an emotion (wegovy is a good example), (2) can be trademarked, and (3) it can survive brand pressure.

Like GMail addresses, all the good names are taken.

The Sonic Hedgehog gene would like a word.

Irrelevant. LLMs know all the names. In 1 year they will be doing all the SSHing and terminaling.

Quickly: name the AVX2 instructions that the compiler emits for math calculations

I could not disagree more. If you say "Ben told Mary that he would work with Scott on Jeff's house on Tuesday, but that Amy preferred Wednesday", that sentence carries a lot of meaning for the speaker and listener because those "names" have meaning to both parties. Nobody would tolerate the descriptive alternative: "General Contracting Company Owner told General Contracting Company Secretary that he would work with General Contracting Company Hired Hand #4 on Customer #22's house on Tuesday but Customer #22 Spouse preferred Wednesday".

Sometimes "branded" names are a good thing.

For example, naming some application modules strictly after what they do is super tedious, and uses words that are already reserved, therefore creating ambiguous nomenclature. Maybe I have various sort of permissions in my system but naming that particular permission system some greek god name creates a clear and shared meaning across the team (both business and technical), and mind you that that's what communication is all about - a shared meaning. Nothing else.

P.S. (I'm deliberately not going into discussion about bad things with that approach)

"...When you see “libsodium,” you must context-switch from problem-solving mode to detective mode: “What does this do? Let me check the README. Ah, it’s a crypto library... "

I would not mind the command names whose etymology was complex or inspired, if the README files would do a better job of giving context and function. Even though I have a wide set of wheelhouses in computer systems, I frequently encounter README files that still leaves me saying "Huh?". I shouldn't have to google three levels down before I get a clue.

The names have always been quirky, but the new names mostly seem to be chosen for some branding / marketing reason (which I don't like). You can basically put "[any noun] javascript library" into google and find something. The space is so saturated that the names have become more and more disconnected from what they describe. Someone should go create labubu.js so people are less inclined to do so themselves. You can benchmark it with matcha (not to be confused with matcha.css).

> Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product.

> (...) Every person who encounters your “fun” name pays a small tax. Across the industry, these taxes compound into significant waste

Devs who build FOSS utilities owe you, or the industry, absolutely nothing. As someone who lists Noam Chomsky under "Some works I recommend engaging with", you sure seem to think capitalists are entitled to people's free work, to the point where you start making demands.

This author has lost the plot.

This is a pretty tangential to the article but Debian is just about the worst there is here. An application will be given a friendly name in an attempt to make it more user friendly. (eg: gedit is called "Text Editor") But, there is often no way whatsoever to map the friendly name back to the actual package name. Want to uninstall gedit? Well if you don't already know what it's called, good luck.

Preach! The worst excuse I hear is "but if we have a meaningless name it can't become inaccurate later when the project changes!".

Uhm yeah. That's like saying "if stab myself to death now I can't die of dementia in old age!"

Edit: look, it's here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237390

Modern web developers: "Oh I just use Gulp, Jenkins, Babel, Yarn, Bower, Grunt, Slurp, Vite, and Rollup"

Me: slowly backs away in disgust

I hate when the steal sci fi concepts and I get falsely excited hearing about say Dyson sphere cold fusion drones.

I have agreed with this for at least a decade. Name your things in a way related to what they do.

What does chef do? Garden? Pig? Burp?

Nonsense.

why is this stupid ai-generated text on hn?

I’m 100% with OP on this. So many posts on the front page have names like “Hamburger — a tool for doing a thing.” These names are neither memorable nor distinctive, good luck trying to look them up later.

Wait till you work in a corporate environment, where Project Fuzzy Mustard triggered a violation of the ElastoFish metric in the Yellow Hills subsystem, leading to a Code Mild Lavender with a side of Pink Sprinkles.

I worked in one that had lettuce, tomato and celery in the stack.

This reads like an extensive, and frankly exhausting, rationalisation of a personal preference. Personal preferences are fine, I have my own. But please stop thinking they apply universally.

Laravel works better than Rails-but-PHP. Ruby on Rails beats Opinionated-One-Person-Stack-Using-Ruby and I'm fine with the name Ruby as well.

I shall name my next product larmn in honour of OP.

I agree for internal names but disagree for public software/external names.

I disagree for public/open-source software, because: So many kinds of software actually have good names. Yes they use mythical names but with the similar function or relatedness.

Meanwhile, I agree for internal names, because: So many (legacy) code I worked with had terrible naming. This goes beyond only the names themselves but also their capitalization or consistency. I kid you not, in a $FAANG company I saw "SpidermanActivity" and "BatmanActivity" on a system that is used by Tier-1 services' on-calls.

> (Although this thing was not a Tier-1 service, it was not also completely Tier-2 either, as it was actively supporting operations of Tier-1 services, depending on the incident, a downtime could cause significant problems...)

Imagine you are trying to make sense of a large system, which has maybe tens of dependencies and as much of dependents, you are also trying to remember which API was Spiderman and how it related to the business at all...

More on the naming conventions, the horrible case of acronyms (which spans outside of software engineering) and PMs creating polls/surveys for "fun names for our new shiny thing that does X but we don't wanna call it that".

Going even lower-levels, engineers themselves are not careful. I had way too many CDK stacks named with not only varying dash vs underscore differences, but also with subtle "case-sensitivity" differences.

Each year, I am solving issues of Java devs' issues. Some of being "but it works on my machine" type of problems. And significant percentage of that is most developers use a Mac & macOS. Hence the filesystem is case-insensitive by default. But the deployment target & CI being a Linux, filesystem is case-sensitive. As you can see here, The camel-case combined with inattentiveness can simply cause many hours of waste.

> It's a plague.

Yes, there is an AI slop, but there is also human sloppiness too. I am quite happy with LLMs/GenAI that it is able to catch and capture these and less prone to make such sloppiness in the first place. (As it being a "predictive-text engine", next word suggestion is a clone of existing copy of historically occurring words)

At the same time, amount of "hallucinations" for various acronyms are staggering. Obviously I cannot expect otherwise. Even as a human, if I am missing the context, I would be either confused or plug-in something I already know...

This just feels like an old man yelling at clouds, trying to convince himself that the grass in greener in the other field.

> 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.

This happens every day. In every scientific field there is a technical name and then the name everyone remembers. Nobody will understand if I speak about ENSG00000164690, but if I say it's the Sonic HedgeHog gene then it starts to make sense, because funny names are memorable.

> awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials)

I'd like to see anyone try to defend how using the creator's initials in a tool name describe its function. Unless you researched the tool's history, there is no way to know that.

Yet another "why the tools I use are the best and the tools you use suck", with a weird focus on naming instead of function.

counterpoints:

pascal, eiffel, ada, C, APL, dylan

C post increment

See sharp

"“We’re using confman for configuration management, which feeds into climan for the CLI, and then wsconn handles our WebSocket connections, permgr manages permissions, all through jqueue for our job queue”"

This is better? Is this Highlander, there can only be one of each thing? What about variations of those tools... cman2? confman? cfigmgr? Naming projects, and hence tools, is often just as much about namespacing as meaning. There _will_ be more than one of most non-trivial tools/projects, and not every configuration manager can be called "confman" (if that's even really a "good" name").

And part of it _is_ connecting utility to an "appelation": calling "your MIT-licensed file parser with 45 GitHub stars" just "parser" practically gaurantees you'll never get that 50th star, because there are already a bunch of "parser" projects and there is no reason for someone to ever find yours.

"Each one demands tribute: a few seconds of mental processing to decode the semantic cipher. Those seconds accumulate into minutes and effort, then career-spanning mountains of wasted cognitive effort."

No they don't, because you're _not_ doing that processing every time. Just like "grep" makes perfect sense _now_ because you've used it forever, once you're working on a project then something like "cobra" immediately maps to "the cli library". It might take a secon the first couple times, but humans are good at this internalizing kind of abstraction, and programmers are damn amazing at it.

The unix tools example is really terrible. "I used grep to examine the confs in etc and then cat to combine them before processing with sed and awk and tarballed the output to be curl'ed to the webdav server." Those are only intuitive because you know them already. "sed" for "stream editor"? Come on, it's not called that because it's a good name. Why not strmed, or even streameditor?. Simple, actually intuitive. It's because 'sed' was the bare minimum to be a short as possible while being unique and just memorable enough. Awk is an even better counter-example to the article's claim: it's just names, makes no sense! Has literally _nothing_ to do with what it does.

"the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait."

Umm, no it doesn't tell you that. Does the Brooklyn Bridge span the Brooklyn strait? George Washinton Bridge? Bridges are not exclusively named by that which they span, and software is not exclusively named after exactly what it does.

Once again proving that there are two very hard problems in software engineering: Naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.

There 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.

>Every person who encounters your “fun” name pays a small tax. Across the industry, these taxes compound into significant waste

>Reserve the creative names for end-user products where branding matters. For infrastructure, tools, and libraries, choose clarity. Every time.

Ah yes the software I am giving away for free must go easy on the minds of the poor VCs and business drones who are extracting value from it.

Is it just me or the website is completely unreadable? Black text on a dark-gray background

One more reason why Windows is superior to OS X.

LMAO ok dude, don't like it? fork it and change the name. The author has a DEEP misunderstanding of the science of human language, not surprised he's a Chomskyite.

Rule of thumb, disregard every post that uses the phrase "context switching"

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