4 ms·

Dear whoever deals with this in i.t. next time you come up with a company or product and name it some pre existing object but now it's a service. Stop. It's a t

Dear whoever deals with this in i.t. next time you come up with a company or product and name it some pre existing object but now it's a service. Stop. It's a terrible decision. Go back to the drawing board. Short flick through this and I see both cider and slime and neither have any correlation to what the words mean. It's a royal pita that tech has gone this way. Can anyone actually explain why this naming method has grown in popularity?

b3n 6y ago
To be fair, they are named SLIME and CIDER, not "slime" and "cider", as they are both acronyms.
albatruss 6y ago
What do you mean "that tech has gone this way"? Since SLIME was written, in 2003?
nimih 6y ago
Yeah, they should've gone with more descriptive names such as "The Clojure Interactive Development Environment" and "The Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs". It's too bad they didn't. On a wholly unrelated note, it is certainly strange that in all their documentation, SLIME and CIDER are stylized as all-caps for some reason; I wish I could figure out why...
- gtvwill 6y ago
  I honestly find it difficult to keep track of these names and their double meanings. It doesn't come across instantly as an acronym it just looks like a company name being yelled. If it were an acronym I'd expect full stops between each letter. I find the long names far more descriptive and useful I can read that and go yep...topic has no interest to me. CIDER doesn't have the same effect. This ain't just this app that's done it. Another app I had a similar mental struggle associating was slack. Literally can't get into my head what the term slack has to do with a messaging app.its been too long associated in my head as a negative term for being lazy. I come from a work history in construction. Things are called what they are and namings generally pretty basic. I don't find dealing with the naming in tech anywhere near as easy. It's a bit of a barrier to learning for me tbh.
  - nimih 6y ago
    Truth be told, I share your frustration in general with tech naming, especially with enterprise tools and web development tools, but I do think that acronyms and initialisms--when the expansion is descriptive and accurate (a non-example being LAME, for instance)--are a reasonable compromise between "call something what it is" (which CIDER and SLIME both do, modulo an extra snarky word or two) and "avoid having a name which is 25 characters long".
agambrahma 6y ago
Wha ... it's in keeping with a rich tradition of project names going back decades. "Gone this way"? Lol.
- agambrahma 6y ago
  Although I _do_ see your point, in that you'd have different expectations from something you'd like to sell to stakeholders in a company ... I guess Cider is self-consciously _outside_ that genre. The feature/bug here is having a very wide spectrum of stuff that people work on, and some of it is simply always going to be non-mainstream by choice/intent.

b3n 6y ago

To be fair, they are named SLIME and CIDER, not "slime" and "cider", as they are both acronyms.

albatruss 6y ago

What do you mean "that tech has gone this way"? Since SLIME was written, in 2003?

nimih 6y ago

Yeah, they should've gone with more descriptive names such as "The Clojure Interactive Development Environment" and "The Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs". It's too bad they didn't. On a wholly unrelated note, it is certainly strange that in all their documentation, SLIME and CIDER are stylized as all-caps for some reason; I wish I could figure out why...

gtvwill 6y ago
I honestly find it difficult to keep track of these names and their double meanings. It doesn't come across instantly as an acronym it just looks like a company name being yelled. If it were an acronym I'd expect full stops between each letter. I find the long names far more descriptive and useful I can read that and go yep...topic has no interest to me. CIDER doesn't have the same effect. This ain't just this app that's done it. Another app I had a similar mental struggle associating was slack. Literally can't get into my head what the term slack has to do with a messaging app.its been too long associated in my head as a negative term for being lazy. I come from a work history in construction. Things are called what they are and namings generally pretty basic. I don't find dealing with the naming in tech anywhere near as easy. It's a bit of a barrier to learning for me tbh.
- nimih 6y ago
  Truth be told, I share your frustration in general with tech naming, especially with enterprise tools and web development tools, but I do think that acronyms and initialisms--when the expansion is descriptive and accurate (a non-example being LAME, for instance)--are a reasonable compromise between "call something what it is" (which CIDER and SLIME both do, modulo an extra snarky word or two) and "avoid having a name which is 25 characters long".

agambrahma 6y ago

Wha ... it's in keeping with a rich tradition of project names going back decades. "Gone this way"? Lol.

agambrahma 6y ago
Although I _do_ see your point, in that you'd have different expectations from something you'd like to sell to stakeholders in a company ... I guess Cider is self-consciously _outside_ that genre. The feature/bug here is having a very wide spectrum of stuff that people work on, and some of it is simply always going to be non-mainstream by choice/intent.