4 ms·

Can we please stop polluting the global namespace with names like "Hack"?

• coldtea 9y ago
  Because?
  • tome 9y ago
    Because it's a short, extremely common, word in our field. Choosing to use it will cause confusion, and it's also rather insulting to those who wanted to use it but restrained themselves for the greater good.
    • dri_ft 9y ago
      These sorts of things also end up being really hard to Google when you need to look something up about them.
      • throwanem 9y ago
        There are a lot of things that have the same names as other things. Given the unaccountable absence of namespacing or package prefixing among the generally accepted set of natural human languages, a bit of disambiguation now and again is just the price we pay for using fast, fluent natural language parsers instead of writing SQL queries. In this case, Google understands "hack font" just fine.
      • coldtea 9y ago
        Never found that to be the case. "hack font" gives me just the font-related links in the front results -- same with "go language" etc. And never had an issue finding Apple or Facebook related stuff and being shown actual apples (the fruit) or Apple (the record company) or facebook (the high school thing).
    • coldtea 9y ago
      That doesn't even make sense. What if there is a font named Hack and a language (which, FWIK, exists as well)? In fact if it's "extremely common" then already there's no such concern. Now it just has N+1 uses. Would it hurt anyone to use context to know which of the two is talked about?
      • tome 9y ago
        > What if there is a font named Hack and a language Then one gets confused between them. Next month a story on HN will be titled "New version of Hack released". That's confusing. > (which, FWIK, exists as well)? Yes I know. That doesn't weaken my point! > Would it hurt anyone to use context to know which of the two is talked about? Of course. Every time one has to spend effort additionally clarifying one's meaning (or worse, someone else's meaning)causes a bit of "hurt". The more popular the project the more the hurt compounds. A case in point: all the people on HN who click through to discussions on ML thinking it was about the language only to find it's an article about machine learning, or vice versa. > In fact if it's "extremely common" then already there's no such concern. Now it just has N+1 uses. I didn't mean it has N different uses as a proper name. I mean that it's a commonly used word as a non-proper-name that represents one concept or a collection of very similar concepts. Ornithologists shouldn't call their new font "Wing" and we shouldn't call our new font "Hack". The other way round would be fine.
        • coldtea 9y ago
          >Then one gets confused between them. Next month a story on HN will be titled "New version of Hack released". That's confusing. For 1 split second. Every year or so. And only if there's no other context in the title (e.g. www.facebook.com). >Of course. Every time one has to spend effort additionally clarifying one's meaning (or worse, someone else's meaning)causes a bit of "hurt". It also exercises the brain for the broader world, where things are not always humanly managed and/or cleanly designed, and only need the least possible effort.
• majewsky 9y ago
  It's not a problem in practice. In most package managers, fonts have a common suffix or prefix anyway. In Arch Linux, Hack is "ttf-hack", for example.
• rayascott 9y ago
  It's the name of the typeface.
  • tome 9y ago
    That's exactly what I'm objecting to.