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Why the name?
- cardamomo 12y agoThe etymology of Unix programs: very interesting! The writers of this page also have a sense of humor: > bc > originally a front-end for dc ("desk-calculator"); modern GNU bc is instead a backwards-compatible byte-code interpreter for dc, but what it stands for is still "basic calculator"
- anyfoo 12y agoWhile a lot of the names have humorous origins, I don't see the humor in this particular entry at all? Can you explain?
- stevebmark 12y agoSome pretty interesting explanations in this list. I personally prefer to not let the developers name things, because they usually come up with very bad names (hard to pronounce, hard to google for, have overtly sexual connotations, etc). Command line utilities are a little different because there's a culture of having short names making them easier to type. But it's still very hard to google for things like "less" because it's a common word.
- chrsstrm 12y agoSearches for "Unix less" or "Linux less" are spot on. Even "less command line" will get you there easily. It's all about context. And of course there are always the man pages, which is usually the best place to start.
- stevebmark 12y agoI personally find the man pages very dense and poorly organized. `man grep` for example is my own personal nightmare. I think the man pages should introduce a policy of simple usage examples instead of throwing 99% of information you don't care about at you at once. Something like http://bropages.org/ http://bropages.org/
- catern 12y agoPerhaps you would find info pages more useful. For example, 'info grep'.
- uxp 12y agoI find that the Man pages on BSD-derived systems are generally quite exceptional, where as GNU-based systems seem to be less so. `info` seems to be their attempt at making a better `man`, but it's pretty hit-or-miss if a Linux-based project thats not from the FSF supports infopages over manpages.
- a3n 12y agoinfo itself is merely annoying (to me). But the one thing I hate about info is that they often change the "see also" near the end of a man page from a list of similar or related commands that you might want to also read, to an invitation to use the info chapter for that command. Aarrrggghhh! man less ... SEE ALSO lesskey(1) man ls ... SEE ALSO The full documentation for ls is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and ls programs are properly installed at your site, the command info coreutils 'ls invocation' should give you access to the complete manual. Why hijack a useful section? Why not just add a "SEE INFO" section?
- thirteenfingers 12y agoGreat fun. One minor nitpick - the story of "Apache Server" being originally derived from "A Patchy Server" is a long-standing myth; the name was originally intended to be a tribute to the Apache Native American peoples. The Wikipedia article on Apache (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server) includes a link to an interview with Brian Behlendorf (http://www.linux-mag.com/id/472/ http://www.linux-mag.com/id/472/) where he explains how the story arose.
- venomsnake 12y agoCommon stuff between Linux and wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside.
- cbd1984 12y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/19970415054031/www.apache.org/info.html http://web.archive.org/web/19970415054031/www.apache.org/inf... > The Apache group was formed around a number of people who provided patch files that had been written for NCSA httpd 1.3. The result after combining them was A PAtCHy server. (April 1997) The new story is not consistent with what their website was saying not very long ago.
- eroncanc 12y agoFor what it's worth, that description was on the site from Oct 1996 [1] to Aug 2001 [2]. 1.http://web.archive.org/web/19961028123412/http://www.apache.org/info.html http://web.archive.org/web/19961028123412/http://www.apache.... 2.http://web.archive.org/web/20010803130101/http://www.apache.org/info.html http://web.archive.org/web/20010803130101/http://www.apache....
- seccess 12y ago"python - is of course a Monty Python reference" I had no idea! Makes me love it even more.
- yen223 12y agoWait till you find out why the IDE that comes with the official Python package is called IDLE ;)
- barsonme 12y agoOr read through Python's docs and find the hidden Monty Python references :-)
- theandrewbailey 12y agoThey are very obvious and not hidden to me.
- JoshTriplett 12y agoAnd the Python Package Index, https://pypi.python.org/pypi https://pypi.python.org/pypi , is also known as the "Cheese Shop".
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y agoI just find it tiresome.
- yawaramin 12y agoAnother fun that appears elsewhere but really does deserve to be in this list: Debian is named after Debra and Ian Murdock (he's the founder of the project, she was his girlfriend).
- coyotebush 12y agoThis list appears to include only software packaged in Debian, but that fact does get a mention at https://www.debian.org/intro/about#history https://www.debian.org/intro/about#history
- geofft 12y agoI've always wondered how Debra feels about that today. (Especially given that so many things abbreviate Debian as "deb" or "Deb-".)
- Animats 12y ago"Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition." Giving cryptic names to software works better if you have a big advertising budget. Otherwise, nobody has a clue what your package does.
- AndyKelley 12y agomissing from the list is one I've always wondered about: bamfdaemon
- Pxtl 12y agoI assume bamf refers to x-men comics where "bamf" was the onomatopoeia for the demonic character Nightcrawler's teleportation.
- cogburnd02 12y agoOfftopic: (1.) As someone who has only seen the movies, does Azazel (First Class) do "Bamf!" in the comics, too? (2.) He's Nightcrawler's dad, right? (WP claims so)
- magicalhorse 12y agobad-ass motherfker daemon?
- zer0rest 12y ago+1 lol
- ajdlinux 12y agoAccording to https://launchpad.net/bamf https://launchpad.net/bamf, it's the BAMF Application Matching Framework
- ForHackernews 12y agoThe free software movement really needs to step up its name-game. No normal people want to use a program called The GIMP.
- yen223 12y agoI was one of those people who heard of the photo editor tool before I watched Pulp Fiction. I had no idea why the name was so controversial.
- AndyKelley 12y agoHow about "git"?
- userbinator 12y agoReminds me of the BDSM-themed splash screen they put in one of the development versions a while back - which seems to have disappeared from the official site, but you can find it if you look hard enough (possibly a bit NSFW): http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1322837600.png http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1322837600.png
- matt4077 12y agoThey happily fly on an airline named "Virgin". I think GIMP is quite ok – possibly better than the too-literal 'Photoshop'. Now if GIMP were actually usable...
- vacri 12y agoThe iPad was mocked for sounding like a feminine hygeine product, yet it seems to have done alright for itself.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoThe difference is that normal people understand the meaning behind the name 'iPad' (Apple's use of 'i' prefix for mobile, the device is like a 'pad' of paper) whilst, to them, Gimp is just a bit ... weird and creepy.
- adito 12y agoIs is just me that get 403 Forbidden error?
- Udo 12y agoNope, I don't get what this is about, either. It's an error page that says Forbidden You are not allowed to access this!
- angelortega 12y agoSo "ruby" is not a play on "perl"? I don't believe it.
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- frik 12y agoparrot (common virtual machine for dynamic languages) named after an April Fool's hoax that came true: http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm What a coincident. In 2015, Perl 6 (Parrot VM) and Python 3 have difficulties to transfer their community over from the former major releases Perl 5 and Python 2. Offtopic: We can learn from it. Like fixing a language early or never/only in small steps. Other examples: XHTML 1 and especially 2 failed, HTML5 based on HTML4 won spectacular. PHP6 failed, but won with PHP 5.3+ and now PHP 7. The transition from Visual Basic 6 and VBA 6 to Visual Basic .Net failed, J#/C# won.
- aaronbrethorst 12y agoJ# definitely did not win. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Sharp#Future_of_J.23 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Sharp#Future_of_J.23
- frik 12y agoI meant Visual Basic 6 developers moved on to C# or web development, as porting VB6 code to VB.net was non trivial. The MS Java to .Net/C# roadmap is off-topic and complicated (afaik: Sun Java -> MS Java (MSJVM) J++ -> J# & C#, C#). J# is dead as of 2015 (it was a transitional language to .Net/C#), but it cannot be denied MS got a VM based environment (CLR) and a Java-inspired language (C# v1). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)#... .
- xorcist 12y agoPerl 6's biggest mistake was naming their language Perl. It turns out Perl-6 is a completely different language from Perl-5, although they share the surrounding ecosystem. But now that the name is taken, Perl-5 is up to version 20.2 with no clear solution in sight to communicate version numbers in the future. I don't think any of the Perl-6 developers actually advocates switching from Perl-5. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.) The situation is quite different from Python 3, which is the newest incarnation of the Python language.
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- vinceyuan 12y agoWe all know "GNU's Not Unix." But what does G stand for?
- andrey-p 12y agoGNU, of course.
- sah2ed 12y agoGNU is a recursive acronym http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym
- vinceyuan 12y agoI know it is a recursive acronym. I just want to know why they chose G, instead of A, B, C, ... etc.
- ewzimm 12y agoStallman liked GNU because it's unpronounceable. When Europeans first discovered the animal, Africans referred to the first sound in its name as a click, which the Europeans didn't use in their languages, so the "g" in the word essentially stands for "unpronounceable sound," and is usually omitted. He used it for fun but brought back the sound in the form of a hard "g."
- smorrow 12y ago"Gnu" is a real word in the dictionary. Edit: On my system it's the only ^.nu$ in the dictionary.
- gwu78 12y agomknod: "nowadays of extremely limited usefulness" Interesting perspective. I use it almost daily. The syscall as well as the provided utility of same name.
- antientropic 12y agoI have to ask: what do you do that you need to create device nodes manually on a daily basis?
- nailer 12y agoAnother great one is 'dd' which stands for 'Copy and Convert'. Oddly enough, cc was already taken.
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- vince_refiti 12y agoWhat is the origin of the name Chicken Scheme?
- icebraining 12y agoOne last question: What inspired the names CHICKEN and SPOCK? Do they mean anything, aside from the bird and the well-known Star Trek character? That question always comes up, sooner or later. ;-) I had a plastic toy of Feathers McGraw on my desk, the evil penguin (disguised as a chicken!) from the Wallace and Gromit movie, “The Wrong Trousers.” Looking for a preliminary working title for the compiler, I used the first thing that came to my mind that day. I’m somewhat superstitious about names for software projects, and things were progressing well, so I didn’t dare to change the name. Also, there is the old philosophical question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? This applies to CHICKEN, too. The compiler is written in Scheme, so you need CHICKEN in order to compile CHICKEN. http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/19/chicken-scheme-spock-part-2/ http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/19/chicken-scheme-spock...
- wantab 12y agoIn most cases, it's not cryptic or strange at all and makes perfect sense. This article ignores history. Back then, names were shortened to save every available byte cause ram and disk usage was so limited. It was also easier to type when you did everything from the command line. In addition, a lot of these were created in some lab somewhere, like Bell Labs, and they had no intention of you using it. Long ago, when I heard of awk and sed, the first thing I did was ask what they stood for. I would think any seriously interested computer person would do the same thing.
- smorrow 12y agoWhen sed was new, the name wouldn't even have been considered cryptic: everybody already new ed. Also: before sed there was gres. I'm not saying it's relevant, just that I've thought it would be better to have gres, and have it be the standard, than sed. (Match and substitution in actually-separate arguments.)
- anyfoo 12y agoIn most cases, it's not cryptic or strange at all and makes perfect sense. Just because it made sense and was entirely justified right then, does not mean that it is not cryptic or strange today. That's kind of the point of the explanations: to explain why the names are so cryptic and strange. Long ago, when I heard of awk and sed, the first thing I did was ask what they stood for. I would think any seriously interested computer person would do the same thing. Interesting expectation. I think why I always wondered, I did not really ask that often. Firstly because when I started, there were not many places to ask for (hardly any non-students even had Internet access), second because it would get tedious after a short time. It's entirely justified for even very serious "computer persons" to have used these commands all the time and only now learning the meaning of some of them.
- wantab 12y agoIt makes sense today and isn't cryptic at all. Perhaps to outsiders it is but we're not outsiders. We know it stands for something and "stream editor" should make sense. Looking it up is a matter of "man sed" or, in my case long ago, I'd turn to the guy sitting next to me and ask him. Yes, awk is an exception, and there are others, but they aren't the rule.
- smorrow 12y ago"awk - see mawk" What.
- krick 12y ago> Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition God, this is so true! I seriously think that world would be much better already if we would just rename many of well-established binaries and C-functions to more-intuitive, better convention. Even without changing APIs that much (which would be great too, of course).
- cbd1984 12y agoGood luck with that. We can't even give the creat() system call an 'e' at the end. (Not that it should be used much these days; the 'creat() then open()' idiom is a race condition waiting to happen, so 'open()' has grown the ability to create-and-open in one atomic operation. That seems to handle most of the file creation that Unix programs need to do.)
- smorrow 12y agocreat was always create-and-open.
- cafard 12y agoI believe that the US Navy used to use Jovial: Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language.
- Rudism 12y agoOne of my favorites from the Windows world is fart.exe (Find And Replace Text).