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Somewhat related is Pavlo's musings on Naming a Database Management System [1]: "In my opinion, the best DBMS names from the last thirty years are Postgres[4]

Somewhat related is Pavlo's musings on Naming a Database Management System [1]: "In my opinion, the best DBMS names from the last thirty years are Postgres[4] and Clickhouse. These two names did not mean anything before, but now they only have one connotation. There is no ambiguity. There is no overlap with other DBMS names or non-database entities. They are easy to spell correctly[5]. Everyone refers to them by their full name. Nobody mistakingly calls them "PostgresDB" or "ClickhouseSQL." After reflecting on what makes them so good, I realized what the secret was to them. They are a two-syllable name that is derived from combining two unrelated one-syllable words together (e.g., Post + Gres, Click + House). Each individual word has its own meaning. It is only when you put them together does it mean the database. Given this, I henceforth contend that the best way to name a DBMS is to combine two one-syllable words." Noise + Page [1]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2020/03/on-naming-a-database-management-system.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2020/03/on-naming-a-datab...

chrismorgan 6y ago
> They are easy to spell correctly[5]. Everyone refers to them by their full name. Nobody mistakingly calls them "PostgresDB" or "ClickhouseSQL." … and yet that article misspells both of them, consistently not calling one of them by its full name (though it acknowledges this in the fourth footnote, with the relevant history). Postgres is actually PostgreSQL. Clickhouse is actually ClickHouse. Gluing two words together guarantees that a significant percentage of your users will misspell it. (I’m categorising incorrect capitalisation as a misspelling.) Some will follow the declared spelling, and some will incorrectly capitalise, regardless of what you declare to be true, either introducing spurious capitals or lowercasing authentic capitals. Some entities change the spelling of their name over time. Some are inconsistent by accident, which I don’t really understand (I could never do it myself; yet I observe it happens quite commonly). But you know what really grinds my gears? When the original source is deliberately inconsistent in its spelling, refusing to declare a canonical spelling, as is the case with sauceHut.

chrismorgan 6y ago

> They are easy to spell correctly[5]. Everyone refers to them by their full name. Nobody mistakingly calls them "PostgresDB" or "ClickhouseSQL." … and yet that article misspells both of them, consistently not calling one of them by its full name (though it acknowledges this in the fourth footnote, with the relevant history). Postgres is actually PostgreSQL. Clickhouse is actually ClickHouse. Gluing two words together guarantees that a significant percentage of your users will misspell it. (I’m categorising incorrect capitalisation as a misspelling.) Some will follow the declared spelling, and some will incorrectly capitalise, regardless of what you declare to be true, either introducing spurious capitals or lowercasing authentic capitals. Some entities change the spelling of their name over time. Some are inconsistent by accident, which I don’t really understand (I could never do it myself; yet I observe it happens quite commonly). But you know what really grinds my gears? When the original source is deliberately inconsistent in its spelling, refusing to declare a canonical spelling, as is the case with sauceHut.