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> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. This article would certainly disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U
by munificent 10mo ago
> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.
This article would certainly disagree with you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Defense_and_partner_code_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def...
> the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait.
Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?".
> The Hoover Dam is a dam, named after the president who commissioned it, not “Project Thunderfall” or “AquaHold.”
It was actually called the "Boulder Canyon Project" while being built, referred to as "Hoover Dam" even though finished during the Roosevelt administration, officially called "Boulder Dam", and only later officially renamed to "Hoover Dam".
The fact that Herbert Hoover initiated the project tells you nothing meaningful about it. Would "Reitzlib" be a better name than "Requests"?
> If you wrote 100 CLIs, you will never counter with a cobra.
But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc.
> No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.
When you open your medicine cabinet, do you look for a jar labeled "acetylsalicylic acid", "2-propylvaleric acid", or "N-acetyl-para-aminophenol"? Probably not.
It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.
- BoppreH 10mo agoI think the author makes a hard distinction between consumer products and infrastructure/engineering products. The Shelby Cobra has a funny name, but its engine is the memorably named V8. The Hoover Dam is a dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge. We can argue about namespace pollution and overly long names, but I think there's a point there. When I look at other profession's jargon, I never have the impression they are catching Pokemon like programmers do. Except for the ones with Latin and Greek names, but old mistakes die hard and they're not bragging about their intelligibility.
- leipert 10mo agoAlso the author misses how elements, species and astronomical objects are named. After random places, people, games, fictional characters, etc. Names are just names. It’s nice if they are kind of unique and have no collisions.
- BoppreH 10mo agoElements are numbered, species are messy categories to begin with and too numerous, and astronomical objects do have sensible naming[1]. But to me it's still unclear what a good naming culture would look like for programmers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_naming_conventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_naming_convention...
- torben-friis 10mo ago>I think the author makes a hard distinction between consumer products and infrastructure/engineering products. Which is really funny considering he talks about emacs.
- themafia 10mo ago> but its engine is the memorably named V8. You're misremembering. It's the "Windsor V8." Or more specifically the "4.8L Windsor Ford V8."
- BoppreH 10mo agoThanks, I'm not a car guy. I double checked with Wikipedia, but clearly I don't even know where I'm supposed to look.
- spauldo 10mo agoYeah, V8 is the shape of the engine - 8 cylinders in two rows offset at an acute angle (i. e. V-shaped). Likewise a V6 has the same number of cylinders as an inline 6 but performs very differently. There's a handful of different engine shapes - I'm fond of the rotary engines used in early aircraft. Traditionally, the name of an engine was just the year, the manufacturer, and the displacement (like 1965 Ford 352). You often leave off the year and even the manufacturer if it's not required by context. The Ford 351 is a bit special because there were two different engines made by Ford in the same time period with the same displacement, so they tacked on the city they were manufactured in (Windsor or Cleveland).
- makeitdouble 10mo ago> The Hoover Dam is a dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge. Nothing stops the author from using "Libsodium crypto lib" and "Zephyr RTOS".
- moregrist 10mo ago> > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable. The author is just wrong. Chemistry is fairly jam-packed with various cutesy names either to amuse the authors or because they’re attempting to make an algorithm memorable to the field. Off the top of my head: - SHAKE and RATTLE: Bond constraint algorithms. - CHARMm: An MD package but you’d never guess it from the name - Amber: Another MD package that you’d never guess from the name. - So so many acronyms from NMR: COSY, TOCSY, NOESY The list goes on and on and permeates most of the subfields in one form or another. If you want really cutesy names, though, look in molecular biology.
- shaftway 10mo ago> > > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable. Lawrencium has entered the chat.
- yongjik 10mo agoOff-topic, but it always amuses me that the sleepy town of Livermore, CA, known locally for its vineyards and an outlet mall, is immortalized in the Periodic Table, instead of the other greater places like New York or Chicago. Chicago even had the world's first nuclear reactor, but no luck.
- einr 10mo agoYtterby is an otherwise pretty insignificant small town of 6k inhabitants in Sweden, but it has FOUR elements named after it: yttrium, terbium, ytterbium, and erbium.
- jghn 10mo agoBiology, not chemistry but there's also the Sonic Hedgehog pathway [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_signaling_pathway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_signaling_pathway
- 10mo ago
- armadsen 10mo agoBiology is another discipline where the author is wrong. See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein
- BuyMyBitcoins 10mo agoDon’t forget the Thagomizer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer
- Y_Y 10mo ago> No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable. But a meteorologist might: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEVE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEVE
- jdranczewski 10mo agoFollowing on on the DoD example, the field of astronomy is infamous for its terrible acronyms: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~gpetitpas/Links/Astroacro.html https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~gpetitpas/Links/Astroacro.html
- rsynnott 10mo agoMilitary codenames are a bit different; they're deliberately random words, assigned so that no-one can guess the nature of the programme based on the name. (Companies sometimes do this, too, for internal stuff.)
- gilcot 10mo agoAnd they're "codenames" not supposed to be as obvious as names…
- buzzardbait 10mo agoGood job pointing out the logical inconsistencies so succinctly. That article is yet another case of a solution looking for a problem.
- titzer 10mo ago> But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc. In this example, you added "chopper", "patrol boat", and "handgun" to disambiguate them. There wouldn't have been enough context to do so otherwise, which IMHO is more aligned with the point the author was making. If you were in the middle of a conversation about helicopters with people who knew lots of helicopter models, just saying "Cobra" would probably be fine. But in the software world, there are far too many obscure and new tools that are not at all clear without context. And the context just always happens to be all the dang things. A cutesy name could be any dang thing. > It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point. I think you're just being selective because you disagree. A better example was: > “We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue.” If we want to cherry pick, your comment has: > When you open your medicine cabinet You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new. It's common usage and doesn't need to be disrupted by someone overly proud of a basic thing they made. You didn't call it Wapsooie, a "playful" take on WPSU (Wall-mounted pharmaceutical storage unit) or a MMC (Materia medica cabinet), or a whole host of other cutesy names or even acronyms that you might eventually get to if you were talking about medicine cabinets all day long, or designing or building them. I mostly agree with the author. Software tools think they're so hilarious. I mean, the Virgil compiler is named "Aeneas" internally. Yet the cli command is "v3c"--Virgil III compiler.
- munificent 10mo agoMy comment was mostly snarky, but I think the author is oblivious to their own biases and wrong. They even say: > I read a lot into software history, and I can’t really say that there was an era of fantastic naming (even very experienced engineers made some very silly naming) but at least some current was trying to make some sense in the 80s; grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). "diff" is a good name. There is no sane argument that "awk" conveys anything meaningful about what the tool does. "grep" is utterly opaque until you know what it's an acronym for. The name itself conveys absolutely nothing. "cat" is actively misleading because it is a word, but the tool has nothing to do with felines at all. The author only likes those names because they're familiar with them, not because they're good names. > You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new. Sure. That's because I only have one medicine cabinet. If I go on homedepot.com and search for medicine cabinets, the bold text is "Glacier Bay", "Zenith", "Kohler", etc. What's frustrating about this article is that the author doesn't even realize why software packages have these funny names. Let's say I want to make a JavaScript package for parsing command-line arguments. Seems like "argparse" is a pretty clear name for that. Taken. Maybe "cliparse"? Taken. "args", "cli", "options", "argparser", "cli_argparser". Yup, all taken. Packages need unique names so that package managers and imports can refer to them unambiguously. You can namespace them with the author's name but that just makes it confusing to talk about when two people say "args" but don't realize that one of them is talking about "@some_rando/args" and the other is talking about "@weird_startup/args". So people just pick cute names. The name is an identifier, not a descriptor. There is no real problem here, the author is just being cranky.