100000000 is 8 significant places. If you build words by choosing out of 10 viable following letters out of an alphabet, you'll hit that in 8 characters. That's

100000000 is 8 significant places. If you build words by choosing out of 10 viable following letters out of an alphabet, you'll hit that in 8 characters. That's not an especially long word. (I don't actually know if that's a good heuristic, but at least it gives an idea.) Maybe a lot of them suck as project names, but name collisions also suck. I'd rather have unique names rather than beautiful but hard to find ones. Collisions are fine if they happen across geographical and cultural boundaries, but the software culture, for better or worse, is pretty global.