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What's in a name? Really, is "Amazon Virtual Servers" much better than "Elastic Compute" ? Maybe slightly. But at the end of the day you have to go look at it a

What's in a name? Really, is "Amazon Virtual Servers" much better than "Elastic Compute" ? Maybe slightly. But at the end of the day you have to go look at it and see wtf that means no matter what, and the 'elastic' verbiage is fairly consistent across AWS products. IAM is similarly not that bad - Identity Access Management pretty much tells me what it is. When we have a field where things are named in extremely unclear ways - kubernetes, docker, kafka, prometheus, etc etc etc - these really don't seem that bad by comparison.

cntrmmbrpsswrd 5y ago
I think everything you said just pointed out how bad it really is in the field. You either have an acronym, which people assume you know, or nonsense words. Boring descriptive names are better, but don't look as good when marketing the product (I'd assume).
- detaro 5y ago
  What's a boring descriptive name that people wouldn't want to turn into an acronym for "Identity and Access Management"?
ljm 5y ago
They're products, sometimes even brands, so I'm not sure why this requirement for clarity is needed. It at least helps differentiate projects in the same space. If I want something to provision infra I could go for Chef, Puppey, Ansible, Terraform. Or is it better for me to write my Infrastructure as Code setup using Whitespace Significant Serialization Format?
fnord77 5y ago
maybe it's an issue with my neurology, but for me if the name isn't descriptive it takes me longer to make association between the name and what it actually is. with "Virtual Servers", I would have only had to look it up once. With "Elastic Computer" it took me months of rereading what that service was for it to sink in.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  That's fascinating and shows how different people are. I'm completely opposite! If you name something "gnorf" or "harjblang" and give me a definition, it occupies a specific unique place in my mind and I can learn memorize use and associate it. With generic terms using generic words making up significant phrases, my mind struggles mightily, whether that's virtual private servers or integrated change control or steering rack control arm... This incidentally is why I struggle to learn any e.g. Car mechanics in English because it's all regular words strung up together Instead of bespoke unique keywords

cntrmmbrpsswrd 5y ago

I think everything you said just pointed out how bad it really is in the field. You either have an acronym, which people assume you know, or nonsense words. Boring descriptive names are better, but don't look as good when marketing the product (I'd assume).

detaro 5y ago
What's a boring descriptive name that people wouldn't want to turn into an acronym for "Identity and Access Management"?

ljm 5y ago

They're products, sometimes even brands, so I'm not sure why this requirement for clarity is needed. It at least helps differentiate projects in the same space. If I want something to provision infra I could go for Chef, Puppey, Ansible, Terraform. Or is it better for me to write my Infrastructure as Code setup using Whitespace Significant Serialization Format?

fnord77 5y ago

maybe it's an issue with my neurology, but for me if the name isn't descriptive it takes me longer to make association between the name and what it actually is. with "Virtual Servers", I would have only had to look it up once. With "Elastic Computer" it took me months of rereading what that service was for it to sink in.

NikolaNovak 5y ago
That's fascinating and shows how different people are. I'm completely opposite! If you name something "gnorf" or "harjblang" and give me a definition, it occupies a specific unique place in my mind and I can learn memorize use and associate it. With generic terms using generic words making up significant phrases, my mind struggles mightily, whether that's virtual private servers or integrated change control or steering rack control arm... This incidentally is why I struggle to learn any e.g. Car mechanics in English because it's all regular words strung up together Instead of bespoke unique keywords