9 ms·

WhyTheName

317 points by thristian 7y ago

ansible 7y ago
I was expecting an entry for exuberant-ctags...
saagarjha 7y ago
I wonder how up-to-date this is.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  It's got Guetzli and Butteraugli (2017), so someone should have been updating the page up to that point.
- pabs3 7y ago
  Last update 2020-02-10: https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=info https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=info
crucialfelix 7y ago
This alone was worth opening the page: > argonaut-* > (server-client distributed deployment infrastructure) for some of the package descriptions in the suite this name is a groan-inducingly obvious Greek-mythology pun, but others don't even mention that its message protocol is encoded in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON "Jason")
Sniffnoy 7y ago
Hm, I would guess that sylpheed is at least partly named after the video game Silpheed?
- a_e_k 7y ago
  "1.5. What does the name Sylpheed mean? It means light weight, like air. This comes from the name of the wind spirits, the Sylphs." https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/doc/faq/en/sylpheed-faq-1.html#d0e187 https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/doc/faq/en/sylpheed-faq-1.html#d0...
dang 7y ago
A thread from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322904 (Link for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
eximius 7y ago
Incredibly ironic that Debian is missing from this page.
- DiabloD3 7y ago
  For those wondering, Debian is a portmanteau of Ian Murdock's and his gf/wife/ex-wife's, Debra, first names. Deb-ian. I wish I could have thanked Ian in person for making the Linux community a better place. It's still the only Linux distro I'll use.
  - dEnigma 7y ago
    This means /ˈde.bi.ən/ in this case. Source: https://www.debian.org/intro/about#history https://www.debian.org/intro/about#history
    - jlgaddis 7y ago
      FWIW, the Debian GNU/Linux FAQ [0] states: > The project name is pronounced Deb'-ee-en, with a short e in Deb, and emphasis on the first syllable. This word is a contraction of the names of Debra and Ian Murdock, who founded the project. (Dictionaries seem to offer some ambiguity in the pronunciation of Ian (!), but Ian prefers ee'-en.) --- [0]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/basic-defs.en.html#pronunciation https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/basic-defs.en....
- JdeBP 7y ago
  I wonder how many people skimmed over the introduction, which pointed to the page where "Debian" is listed. ... and then noted the inconsistency made at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/909924023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/909924023 by JWilk. (-:
  - eximius 7y ago
    At least one. :)
abjKT26nO8 7y ago
> Apache-Licensed PINE, where pine was the old (non-DFSG-free) "Program for Internet News and E-mail" - formerly known as "Pine Is Nearly Elm", named after a yet older electronic mail program. Nowadays contains its fork realpine, which the developers insist is re-alpine (alpine development restarted, since the original team seems to not be doing much) and not real-pine… Ok, I guess…?
tadzik_ 7y ago
One interesting bit that I found missing on that page is ncmpcpp, which is a simple one (in a way), and also contains its entire genealogy in the name. First there was mpc, the music player (daemon) client. Then someone made the ncurses version, so of course that was named ncmpc. Then someone decided to add more features and rewrite it in C++, and voila.
- urxvtcd 7y ago
  There's similar story to urxvtcd which is my nickname here, haha. They have an entry on rxvt: Rob Nation's fork of the X11 Virtual Terminal; originally "Robert's" xvt, later "our" xvt. Then they added "u" for unicode support. And then urxvt can run a daemon to which clients connect for faster startup or something, so we have urxvtc and urxvtd, and finally there was a script on some distro I used which checked for a daemon, run it if it not existed, and then run client, so urxvtcd. Could have made one with color support included in the name too, like urxvtcd256.
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    ... which is only part of the tale. Some of the rest involves the fact that "rxvt-unicode-256color" is too many characters for the termcap/terminfo databases on some operating systems.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Also similar: Alpine > Apache-Licensed PINE, where pine was the old (non-DFSG-free) "Program for Internet News and E-mail" - formerly known as "Pine Is Nearly Elm", named after a yet older electronic mail program. Nowadays contains its fork realpine, which the developers insist is re-alpine (alpine development restarted, since the original team seems to not be doing much) and not real-pine…
mothsonasloth 7y ago
Forgive me if this is a bit morbid, but we are lucky as computer scientists and engineers to have a largely "living history" over the last century of innovation. Documentation is great in some respects but we should try and go out of our way to interact and cherish the pioneers of early computing more before they pass on. What do I mean by "more"; when we have forums, mailgroups, IRC, conferences etc.? I guess more books, more interviews and more documentation. One thing I like to do with junior developers is when I see them using a terminal command that they just copy and pasted from stackoverflow, I try and coach them to read up about it on manpages or documentation online, so they can get a better feel of what the history was behind that tool.
- qppo 7y ago
  I hope you're right, most of what we know about Plato's teachings came from his students that took good notes. That said, I do have trouble finding the "history" of a particular technical idea. There's a lot of interesting things that are a certain way but haven't been documented about "why" because the author never thought to put them down. Indeed the most interesting things to posterity are the ones we don't even think about.
  - OskarS 7y ago
    > I hope you're right, most of what we know about Plato's teachings came from his students that took good notes. You're thinking of Socrates, not Plato. Plato is the one of the few ancient writers where it's believed that basically his the entire body of work has been preserved. What we know of Plato's philosophy, we know from Plato directly. Socrates, however, did not write anything down: he was famously opposed to the concept of writing, thinking it induced forgetfulness. His philosophy is thus almost entirely known through his students, primarily through Plato. There are a few others (Xenophon was also Socrates' student and wrote about him), but Plato is by far the most significant.
- thristian 7y ago
  You may be interested in this 2016 talk about oral history in software engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw To oversimplify: we should write more interesting and historical comments in our codebases, write more blog posts and give more talks, and share more links to blog posts and talks other people have created.
einpoklum 7y ago
> anthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Girl_Utena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Girl_Utena > corosync Not useful for Corona! > figlet Surprisingly - not a portmanteau of figure + piglet!
gbrown_ 7y ago
It would be fun to have a list of projects that contrived the reasoning after choosing the name. The DNF package manger always springs to my mind when naming comes up. Originally it didn't stand for anything, despite the use of DNF in sports to denote "Did Not Finish" (hardly a great connotation for most software). Though it appears to have since been coined as "Dandified YUM".
- aktuel 7y ago
  My mnemonic was always "do not fuckup (my system)!"
  - justusthane 7y ago
    GNU’s Not Unix
- sk0g 7y ago
  > contrived the reasoning after choosing the name I believe you're looking for the word "backronym"? There's a few notable ones I can think of, like Amber Alert, and SOS.
  - gbrown_ 7y ago
    > I believe you're looking for the word "backronym"? TIL.
geokon 7y ago
a bit tangential, while this is cute, what I've never been able to find is a definitive digestible guide to the final Debian package names. what does -dev -doc etc. really mean? (I often need a -dev package for stuff I'm not even building for some reason) why do some libs tack on a 'lib' at the front while some do not? why are package versions often seemingly unrelated to upstream versions? and sometimes packages come is multiple versions (like GCC) and yet often they don't.. seemingly randomly. for instance i just looked up lxqt which is listed as version 13... I don't know what version that corresponds to upstream.. 1.13? Maybe? it's all incredibly beginner unfriendly maybe someone has a good reference?
- Denvercoder9 7y ago
  > what does -dev -doc etc. really mean? -dev packages ship the header files for C/C++ libraries, and in some odd cases also static libraries. -doc packages ship documentation (unsurprisingly). Usually they only exist for things like libraries and interpreteres, where the documentation can be sizable and is only needed by a (small) subset of the users that have the package installed. > I often need a -dev package for stuff I'm not even building for some reason That's because to compile something that links against a library, you need to have the header files available. > why do some libs tack on a 'lib' at the front while some do not Aside from a few leftover historical oddities (primarily zlib), all shared libraries should be prefixed with lib. > why are package versions often seemingly unrelated to upstream versions? They should be. Exceptions are made for "native" packages (which usually provide Debian-specific software or integrations) and upstreams that don't really follow any versioning scheme. > sometimes packages come is multiple versions (like GCC) and yet often they don't In the steady state there should be only one version of every package. During the transition to a new version, especially of very core packages such as GCC, there might temporarily be more. It's unfortunately happened in the past that multiple versions ended up in stable, but that was because the Linux kernel required a specific GCC version. > for instance i just looked up lxqt which is listed as version 13... I don't know what version that corresponds to upstream.. 1.13? The LXQT package is a "native" package that only provides integration between Debian and LXQT, and as such it doesn't follow LXQT's version numbering. If you instead look at any actual LXQT software (e.g. lxqt-session), they follow the upstream versioning (0.14). I agree that it's a bit confusing, but it's a result of the development process.
Thorentis 7y ago
Was disappointed to see Debian itself not in the list. Why is Debian called Debian?
- growse 7y ago
  It's a portmanteau of founder Ian Murdock's name with his then-wife's, Debra.
- herio 7y ago
  Ian Murdocks (debians founder) then girlfriend, later wife, is named Debra. You can probably extrapolate the rest.
Wiretrip 7y ago
I would love to see an article about how people pronounce some of the strange names and acronyms we have ended up with. Quick survey? 'etc', 'gif', 'uefi', 'wget', 'cifs' ?
- dsr_ 7y ago
  I once made a British sysadmin T|N>K * when I referred to eff tee pee dot ick ack ook, a repository of open source software. (* tea piped through nose out to keyboard)
  - twic 7y ago
    ick ack uck, please!
- iamkroot 7y ago
  Etcetra Gift Yoo-effy Wuh-get Sifs
- riffic 7y ago
  I'll just say "et-sea" and stop there to avoid further arguments
verytrivial 7y ago
I had always assumed that Expat was called that because James Clark lived in Thailand.
nailer 7y ago
Missing 'dd' 'dd' stands for copy and convert. 'cc' was taken by the C compiler.
- mtremsal 7y ago
  It's under coreutils I think.
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    It is, indeed; added three years before this came up on Hacker News five years ago. It then got added again. * https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=diff&rev1=14&rev2=15 https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=diff&rev1=14&rev2=... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9323623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9323623 * https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=diff&rev1=183&rev2=184 https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=diff&rev1=183&rev2...
- Ayesh 7y ago
  Haha, thank you. This one is hilarious!
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  False. 'dd' is a JCL utility from IBM mainframes. Both the Unix command name and syntax are directly lifted from the mainframe version of the ... data definition ... utility. https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r1.ieab600/ddst.htm https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/... https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/HAWoZ8g-xYk/HDUVxwTVLKAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.compute... https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/K4uzWBugSPE/GwSgDUEU_3wJ https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.compute...
  - dfox 7y ago
    DD in JCL is not an utility, but keyword. Its functionality is something between shell's IO redirection and mounting volumes inside docker containers. The syntax itself is not that obscure in the context of JCL and IBM OSes.
fbelzile 7y ago
> mysql-* a Structured Query Language server named after the original developer's daughter "My" (cf. also mariadb) Learned something new today... It's crazy to think how we take some of these technologies for granted while never stopping to think about the individual human beings that made it all possible to begin with. Anyone know of a good podcast or website that does a deep dive into the history of how different computer technologies (esp open source ones) came to be the way they are?
- jboynyc 7y ago
  I think I learned the MySQL tidbit recently from an episode of the podcast Libre Lounge. What you ask for is not a bad description of what the hosts of that podcast do: deep dives into open source technologies and discussions of how they came to be the way they are.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - emacsen 7y ago
    <3
- enticeing 7y ago
  From Wikipedia: > daughter Maria (after whom MariaDB was named), and has a daughter My (after whom MySQL was named)[16] and a son Max (giving the name for MaxDB) from his first marriage He has a habit, apparently :P
- danso 7y ago
  Check out Changelog's episode on SQLite, which was recently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367104
- EricRiese 7y ago
  Command Line Heroes is exactly what you want. https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes
davidgerard 7y ago
> an arbitrary animal name specifically chosen to get a tomcat onto the O'Reilly book cover actual LOL
OedipusRex 7y ago
Whoever wrote this, hats off. >chromium - web browsers on Linux spent a decade going through a cycle of slick new slimline web browsers gradually getting buried in creeping features until they were as weighed down with chrome grills and ornamental fins as a fifties US car, at which point everyone would switch to some new minimalist alternative. Meanwhile these GUI widgets came to be referred to as "chrome", which explains why Google would choose to advertise their browser as if it was manufactured entirely out of deadweight bling...
- teddyh 7y ago
  The term “chrome” is older than web browsers: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/chrome.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/chrome.html
riffic 7y ago
I wish the topics here on HN would include a bit more context so it wasn't necessary to click on each link to find out what the post was about. I love these sort of naming derivations, and it shows a certain creativity and irreverent humor found in the free software world. I wish that naming was a simpler aspect of software development -- often times it's the ultimate form of bikeshedding.
- CameronNemo 7y ago
  The name of the post was originally something like "etymology of Debian package names", but an admin decided that they did not like that name and changed it.
knolax 7y ago
They're going to have to use Rabbis to decipher this stuff in the future.
xenonite 7y ago
"WhyTheLuckyStiff" - although off topic, let's remember the time of the cheery comics and the epics of Ruby programming :-)
devchix 7y ago
yp prefix, eg ypwhich ypcat, etc. Stands for Yellow Page, later became Sun NIS because Yellow Page is a trademark.

WhyTheName

317 points by thristian 7y ago

ansible 7y ago

I was expecting an entry for exuberant-ctags...

saagarjha 7y ago

I wonder how up-to-date this is.

lifthrasiir 7y ago
It's got Guetzli and Butteraugli (2017), so someone should have been updating the page up to that point.
pabs3 7y ago
Last update 2020-02-10: https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=info https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=info

crucialfelix 7y ago

This alone was worth opening the page: > argonaut-* > (server-client distributed deployment infrastructure) for some of the package descriptions in the suite this name is a groan-inducingly obvious Greek-mythology pun, but others don't even mention that its message protocol is encoded in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON "Jason")

Sniffnoy 7y ago

Hm, I would guess that sylpheed is at least partly named after the video game Silpheed?

a_e_k 7y ago
"1.5. What does the name Sylpheed mean? It means light weight, like air. This comes from the name of the wind spirits, the Sylphs." https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/doc/faq/en/sylpheed-faq-1.html#d0e187 https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/doc/faq/en/sylpheed-faq-1.html#d0...

dang 7y ago

A thread from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322904 (Link for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

eximius 7y ago

Incredibly ironic that Debian is missing from this page.

DiabloD3 7y ago
For those wondering, Debian is a portmanteau of Ian Murdock's and his gf/wife/ex-wife's, Debra, first names. Deb-ian. I wish I could have thanked Ian in person for making the Linux community a better place. It's still the only Linux distro I'll use.
- dEnigma 7y ago
  This means /ˈde.bi.ən/ in this case. Source: https://www.debian.org/intro/about#history https://www.debian.org/intro/about#history
  - jlgaddis 7y ago
    FWIW, the Debian GNU/Linux FAQ [0] states: > The project name is pronounced Deb'-ee-en, with a short e in Deb, and emphasis on the first syllable. This word is a contraction of the names of Debra and Ian Murdock, who founded the project. (Dictionaries seem to offer some ambiguity in the pronunciation of Ian (!), but Ian prefers ee'-en.) --- [0]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/basic-defs.en.html#pronunciation https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/basic-defs.en....
JdeBP 7y ago
I wonder how many people skimmed over the introduction, which pointed to the page where "Debian" is listed. ... and then noted the inconsistency made at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/909924023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/909924023 by JWilk. (-:
- eximius 7y ago
  At least one. :)

abjKT26nO8 7y ago

> Apache-Licensed PINE, where pine was the old (non-DFSG-free) "Program for Internet News and E-mail" - formerly known as "Pine Is Nearly Elm", named after a yet older electronic mail program. Nowadays contains its fork realpine, which the developers insist is re-alpine (alpine development restarted, since the original team seems to not be doing much) and not real-pine… Ok, I guess…?

tadzik_ 7y ago

One interesting bit that I found missing on that page is ncmpcpp, which is a simple one (in a way), and also contains its entire genealogy in the name. First there was mpc, the music player (daemon) client. Then someone made the ncurses version, so of course that was named ncmpc. Then someone decided to add more features and rewrite it in C++, and voila.

urxvtcd 7y ago
There's similar story to urxvtcd which is my nickname here, haha. They have an entry on rxvt: Rob Nation's fork of the X11 Virtual Terminal; originally "Robert's" xvt, later "our" xvt. Then they added "u" for unicode support. And then urxvt can run a daemon to which clients connect for faster startup or something, so we have urxvtc and urxvtd, and finally there was a script on some distro I used which checked for a daemon, run it if it not existed, and then run client, so urxvtcd. Could have made one with color support included in the name too, like urxvtcd256.
- JdeBP 7y ago
  ... which is only part of the tale. Some of the rest involves the fact that "rxvt-unicode-256color" is too many characters for the termcap/terminfo databases on some operating systems.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Also similar: Alpine > Apache-Licensed PINE, where pine was the old (non-DFSG-free) "Program for Internet News and E-mail" - formerly known as "Pine Is Nearly Elm", named after a yet older electronic mail program. Nowadays contains its fork realpine, which the developers insist is re-alpine (alpine development restarted, since the original team seems to not be doing much) and not real-pine…

mothsonasloth 7y ago

Forgive me if this is a bit morbid, but we are lucky as computer scientists and engineers to have a largely "living history" over the last century of innovation. Documentation is great in some respects but we should try and go out of our way to interact and cherish the pioneers of early computing more before they pass on. What do I mean by "more"; when we have forums, mailgroups, IRC, conferences etc.? I guess more books, more interviews and more documentation. One thing I like to do with junior developers is when I see them using a terminal command that they just copy and pasted from stackoverflow, I try and coach them to read up about it on manpages or documentation online, so they can get a better feel of what the history was behind that tool.

qppo 7y ago
I hope you're right, most of what we know about Plato's teachings came from his students that took good notes. That said, I do have trouble finding the "history" of a particular technical idea. There's a lot of interesting things that are a certain way but haven't been documented about "why" because the author never thought to put them down. Indeed the most interesting things to posterity are the ones we don't even think about.
- OskarS 7y ago
  > I hope you're right, most of what we know about Plato's teachings came from his students that took good notes. You're thinking of Socrates, not Plato. Plato is the one of the few ancient writers where it's believed that basically his the entire body of work has been preserved. What we know of Plato's philosophy, we know from Plato directly. Socrates, however, did not write anything down: he was famously opposed to the concept of writing, thinking it induced forgetfulness. His philosophy is thus almost entirely known through his students, primarily through Plato. There are a few others (Xenophon was also Socrates' student and wrote about him), but Plato is by far the most significant.
thristian 7y ago
You may be interested in this 2016 talk about oral history in software engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw To oversimplify: we should write more interesting and historical comments in our codebases, write more blog posts and give more talks, and share more links to blog posts and talks other people have created.

einpoklum 7y ago

> anthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Girl_Utena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Girl_Utena > corosync Not useful for Corona! > figlet Surprisingly - not a portmanteau of figure + piglet!

gbrown_ 7y ago

It would be fun to have a list of projects that contrived the reasoning after choosing the name. The DNF package manger always springs to my mind when naming comes up. Originally it didn't stand for anything, despite the use of DNF in sports to denote "Did Not Finish" (hardly a great connotation for most software). Though it appears to have since been coined as "Dandified YUM".

aktuel 7y ago
My mnemonic was always "do not fuckup (my system)!"
- justusthane 7y ago
  GNU’s Not Unix
sk0g 7y ago
> contrived the reasoning after choosing the name I believe you're looking for the word "backronym"? There's a few notable ones I can think of, like Amber Alert, and SOS.
- gbrown_ 7y ago
  > I believe you're looking for the word "backronym"? TIL.

geokon 7y ago

a bit tangential, while this is cute, what I've never been able to find is a definitive digestible guide to the final Debian package names. what does -dev -doc etc. really mean? (I often need a -dev package for stuff I'm not even building for some reason) why do some libs tack on a 'lib' at the front while some do not? why are package versions often seemingly unrelated to upstream versions? and sometimes packages come is multiple versions (like GCC) and yet often they don't.. seemingly randomly. for instance i just looked up lxqt which is listed as version 13... I don't know what version that corresponds to upstream.. 1.13? Maybe? it's all incredibly beginner unfriendly maybe someone has a good reference?

Denvercoder9 7y ago
> what does -dev -doc etc. really mean? -dev packages ship the header files for C/C++ libraries, and in some odd cases also static libraries. -doc packages ship documentation (unsurprisingly). Usually they only exist for things like libraries and interpreteres, where the documentation can be sizable and is only needed by a (small) subset of the users that have the package installed. > I often need a -dev package for stuff I'm not even building for some reason That's because to compile something that links against a library, you need to have the header files available. > why do some libs tack on a 'lib' at the front while some do not Aside from a few leftover historical oddities (primarily zlib), all shared libraries should be prefixed with lib. > why are package versions often seemingly unrelated to upstream versions? They should be. Exceptions are made for "native" packages (which usually provide Debian-specific software or integrations) and upstreams that don't really follow any versioning scheme. > sometimes packages come is multiple versions (like GCC) and yet often they don't In the steady state there should be only one version of every package. During the transition to a new version, especially of very core packages such as GCC, there might temporarily be more. It's unfortunately happened in the past that multiple versions ended up in stable, but that was because the Linux kernel required a specific GCC version. > for instance i just looked up lxqt which is listed as version 13... I don't know what version that corresponds to upstream.. 1.13? The LXQT package is a "native" package that only provides integration between Debian and LXQT, and as such it doesn't follow LXQT's version numbering. If you instead look at any actual LXQT software (e.g. lxqt-session), they follow the upstream versioning (0.14). I agree that it's a bit confusing, but it's a result of the development process.

Thorentis 7y ago

Was disappointed to see Debian itself not in the list. Why is Debian called Debian?

growse 7y ago
It's a portmanteau of founder Ian Murdock's name with his then-wife's, Debra.
herio 7y ago
Ian Murdocks (debians founder) then girlfriend, later wife, is named Debra. You can probably extrapolate the rest.

Wiretrip 7y ago

I would love to see an article about how people pronounce some of the strange names and acronyms we have ended up with. Quick survey? 'etc', 'gif', 'uefi', 'wget', 'cifs' ?

dsr_ 7y ago
I once made a British sysadmin T|N>K * when I referred to eff tee pee dot ick ack ook, a repository of open source software. (* tea piped through nose out to keyboard)
- twic 7y ago
  ick ack uck, please!
iamkroot 7y ago
Etcetra Gift Yoo-effy Wuh-get Sifs
riffic 7y ago
I'll just say "et-sea" and stop there to avoid further arguments

verytrivial 7y ago

I had always assumed that Expat was called that because James Clark lived in Thailand.

nailer 7y ago

Missing 'dd' 'dd' stands for copy and convert. 'cc' was taken by the C compiler.

mtremsal 7y ago
It's under coreutils I think.
- JdeBP 7y ago
  It is, indeed; added three years before this came up on Hacker News five years ago. It then got added again. * https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=diff&rev1=14&rev2=15 https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=diff&rev1=14&rev2=... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9323623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9323623 * https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=diff&rev1=183&rev2=184 https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName?action=diff&rev1=183&rev2...
Ayesh 7y ago
Haha, thank you. This one is hilarious!
dredmorbius 7y ago
False. 'dd' is a JCL utility from IBM mainframes. Both the Unix command name and syntax are directly lifted from the mainframe version of the ... data definition ... utility. https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r1.ieab600/ddst.htm https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/... https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/HAWoZ8g-xYk/HDUVxwTVLKAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.compute... https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/K4uzWBugSPE/GwSgDUEU_3wJ https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.compute...
- dfox 7y ago
  DD in JCL is not an utility, but keyword. Its functionality is something between shell's IO redirection and mounting volumes inside docker containers. The syntax itself is not that obscure in the context of JCL and IBM OSes.

fbelzile 7y ago

> mysql-* a Structured Query Language server named after the original developer's daughter "My" (cf. also mariadb) Learned something new today... It's crazy to think how we take some of these technologies for granted while never stopping to think about the individual human beings that made it all possible to begin with. Anyone know of a good podcast or website that does a deep dive into the history of how different computer technologies (esp open source ones) came to be the way they are?

jboynyc 7y ago
I think I learned the MySQL tidbit recently from an episode of the podcast Libre Lounge. What you ask for is not a bad description of what the hosts of that podcast do: deep dives into open source technologies and discussions of how they came to be the way they are.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- emacsen 7y ago
  <3
enticeing 7y ago
From Wikipedia: > daughter Maria (after whom MariaDB was named), and has a daughter My (after whom MySQL was named)[16] and a son Max (giving the name for MaxDB) from his first marriage He has a habit, apparently :P
danso 7y ago
Check out Changelog's episode on SQLite, which was recently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367104
EricRiese 7y ago
Command Line Heroes is exactly what you want. https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes

davidgerard 7y ago

> an arbitrary animal name specifically chosen to get a tomcat onto the O'Reilly book cover actual LOL

OedipusRex 7y ago

Whoever wrote this, hats off. >chromium - web browsers on Linux spent a decade going through a cycle of slick new slimline web browsers gradually getting buried in creeping features until they were as weighed down with chrome grills and ornamental fins as a fifties US car, at which point everyone would switch to some new minimalist alternative. Meanwhile these GUI widgets came to be referred to as "chrome", which explains why Google would choose to advertise their browser as if it was manufactured entirely out of deadweight bling...

teddyh 7y ago
The term “chrome” is older than web browsers: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/chrome.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/chrome.html

riffic 7y ago

I wish the topics here on HN would include a bit more context so it wasn't necessary to click on each link to find out what the post was about. I love these sort of naming derivations, and it shows a certain creativity and irreverent humor found in the free software world. I wish that naming was a simpler aspect of software development -- often times it's the ultimate form of bikeshedding.

CameronNemo 7y ago
The name of the post was originally something like "etymology of Debian package names", but an admin decided that they did not like that name and changed it.

knolax 7y ago

They're going to have to use Rabbis to decipher this stuff in the future.

xenonite 7y ago

"WhyTheLuckyStiff" - although off topic, let's remember the time of the cheery comics and the epics of Ruby programming :-)

devchix 7y ago

yp prefix, eg ypwhich ypcat, etc. Stands for Yellow Page, later became Sun NIS because Yellow Page is a trademark.