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Aesthetically, at this point descriptive names almost look unprofessional, or at least quickly made. If you call your thing "ui-state-syncer" I'm going to suspe
by eternityforest 4y ago
Aesthetically, at this point descriptive names almost look unprofessional, or at least quickly made. If you call your thing "ui-state-syncer" I'm going to suspect it's not really a big budget mainstream thing.
If it's called Vue, I'm going to think it's big enough that someone thought it was worth it to spend an hour thinking of names. It was intended to get big. This isn't some minimal internal thing for one specific use case that probably isn't mine. I'll be more likely to check it out.
They also limit the scope of a project. If you have a "datasender" people will say "This shouldn't preprocess data! This shouldn't compress! This shouldn't intelligently decide when to drop frames! It should just send!"
Now you gotta have a separate frame droppy preprocess thing, and the part that does communication has to tell it what kind of loss you have, but even that is not just sending data, so more likely you won't get that feature at all, or you'll have to go beyond the name.
If you hate features I guess it's a good way to make them hard to implement.
- Tade0 4y agoSeems that names for projects follow the same rule as troll names in the japanese light novel Overlord. Short names, like "Gru" were reserved for the most powerful trolls because there were only so many combinations of three letters. Long names on the other hand were a sign of weakness and cowardice - bringing ridicule to those who introduced themselves like that.
- HPsquared 4y agoSed and awk kind of sound like high-level troll names.
- hulitu 4y agoAwk, i underestand (Aho, We...) but sed ? Stream editor ?
- smsm42 4y agoYes.
- koolba 4y agoBoth of which cower in fear when vi strolls by.
- JosephGuerra 4y agoBill, Bert, Tom, Sed and Awk. It kind of works.
- davidkunz 4y agoAn indicator of the dangers of C.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoBack when a C functions and variables could only be 8 chars long[1], mid-to-high-level trolls lurk at every line. [1]: or rather, if they were longer, the first 8 had to be unique.
- OrangeMonkey 4y agoI was literally - minutes ago - watching Overlord then saw this message just now. Small world sometimes. Rich world building that it can be referenced easily.
- Tade0 4y agoI hesitated to mention it because of the stigma associated with weebetry, but I'm glad I did. After all hackers were always - by and large - weebs, with their fascination with martial arts and Japanese culture.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 4y agoIf you are going up against Gothmark, Destroyer of Worlds you might have a chance. But if everyone calls the big bad Dennis you’re pretty much doomed.
- e1g 4y agoAs a counter example, there are plenty of successful projects/brands with highly descriptive names: TypeScript, RHEL, GitHub, AWS, GraphQL, HAproxy, Sendmail, QuickBooks, …
- Joker_vD 4y agoWhat is descriptive about "RHEL" or "AWS"?
- smsm42 4y agoAWS was useful until it became to mean "about 9000 totally unrelated products, each of them having its own name, sometimes very non-descriptive". But at least you know it's a service from Amazon, sometimes you don't even get that from the name.
- anonymoushn 4y agoRed Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon Web Services?
- ForHackernews 4y ago"Amazon Web Services" could mean literally anything. It only seems obvious and descriptive because it's become a widely known brand. Compare: "Nile Online Frameworks"
- PurpleRamen 4y agoBut, isn't AWS doing literally everything? No simple name can describe the job 100% after a certain level of complexity anyway.
- lupire 4y ago> Compare: "Nile Online Frameworks" Those are synonyms. What is your point?
- e1g 4y ago
- munificent 4y ago> Aesthetically, at this point descriptive names almost look unprofessional, or at least quickly made. I think part of this is that in software ecosystems that have been around a long time, the most obvious descriptive name for a package tends to have been chosen by the package that got there first but is now has an API riddled with outdated anti-patterns and whose code hasn't been touched in a decade because eventually everything becomes a breaking change. The newer package has to pick a weird-but-available name, but has the luxury of rebooting with a cleaner, simpler API and an implementation free of "bugs" that must be kept around in the name of backwards compatibility. Once you experience enough of those, you subconsciously develop an association that "boring obvious name" equals "crappy API and weird behavior" while "weird random name" signals "nice modern API and coherent semantics". Of course, it's not always true, but humans are voracious pattern matchers and will create an association at the slightest hint of correlation.