[HN Gopher] Programmers and software developers lost the plot on...
___________________________________________________________________
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their
tools
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 94 points
Date : 2025-12-11 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (larr.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (larr.net)
| rini17 wrote:
| That glorious day when I explained to my boss what wiki is and
| that we should have one internally, he fired "viki" into google,
| with smoothly honed muscle memory clicked first result..and got
| full screen of poon.
| Kuraj wrote:
| At least you weren't the guy hitting a wall when trying to get
| a testing library integrated because it was named Testacular
| Tade0 wrote:
| Back in college we had an old program used to analyse
| oscilloscope data named ANAL.
| breezykoi wrote:
| At school we called our module analsyn for syntactic
| analyser. Good times.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I studied analytic combinatorics in grad school. Had to be
| sure not to abbreviate it to "anal comb".
| Izkata wrote:
| When I told a co-worker about
| https://pypi.org/project/voluptuous/ he immediately searched
| for the name alone, got really wide-eyed and closed the tab,
| then told us not to do the same.
| patrickmay wrote:
| I asked to have LaTeX installed at one site, several years ago.
| The first Google results were eye-opening.
| dhosek wrote:
| I had a student in one of my LaTeX classes back in the 90s
| who had a "I lust for latex" T-shirt.
| zzrrt wrote:
| What was the first result? Mine is Rakuten Viki, a streaming
| service focused on Asian dramas that aren't like what you
| described.
| marifjeren wrote:
| There is actually a good reason not mentioned, not to name tools
| by their purpose:
|
| - the purpose will change
|
| Your "silicon-valley-bank-integrator" tool will eventually need
| to be updated to do something else.
|
| Or your "login-page-config-service" tool may eventually do more
| than just logins.
|
| Using gibberish or mythological names gives a nice memorable name
| that doesn't lead (or mislead) you to believe it does a
| particular thing which may or may not be correct anymore.
| lr0 wrote:
| "purpose will change" argument actually proves the opposite
| point. When a tool's scope expands beyond its name, the
| descriptive name tells you something went wrong. But even if
| so, if you have to rename "login-page-config-service" to "auth-
| config-service" it is not really a big deal, renaming will be
| much cheaper if you're renaming to descriptive names. Most
| importantly though, I wouldn't optimize to avoid renaming
| (happens once, maybe twice in a project's lifetime) by making
| discovery hard (happens every single time someone encounters
| the tool).
| dietr1ch wrote:
| > renaming will be much cheaper if you're renaming to
| descriptive names
|
| Idk, renaming things that shipped is a PITA.
|
| Say you wanted to rename `fish` to `a-decent-shell`. -
| Packages in all distros would need to be renamed. -
| Configuration for all systems using/having fish would need to
| change. - Scripts would need to change, from the shebang to
| the contents if necessary. - Users would need to understand
| that they now need to search documentation using the new
| name. - Documentation would need to be migrated to new
| domains, sed-replaced, and reviewed.
|
| All this migration would require some synchronized, multi-
| step process across multiple distros and deployments.
|
| I'd rather have a name that works as an Id.
| lr0 wrote:
| > Say you wanted to rename `fish` to `a-decent-shell`
|
| You just made my argument. Renaming is hard precisely
| because you shipped with the wrong name. That's why you
| should get it right from the start.
|
| Every cost you listed [distro packages, configs, scripts,
| docs, domain] exists whether you rename to something
| descriptive OR another random word. The migration pain is
| identical. "Fish" - "decent-shell" costs the same as "fish"
| - "zephyr." My argument was that this renaming won't be
| necessary if you started by picking up the proper name at
| the first place, and it's very unlikely to have the need to
| rename it. We shouldn't be optimizing to avoid renaming.
| That's trading a rare maintenance event for permanent
| cognitive overhead.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| > Renaming is hard precisely because you shipped with the
| wrong name. That's why you should get it right from the
| start.
|
| No, it's just because the goddamn string Id appears in
| way too many places and you can't sed-replace the entire
| world at once. It doesn't matter if the string was cute,
| fancy, or you found it to be a good name.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| > We shouldn't be optimizing to avoid renaming.
|
| > you should get it right from the start.
|
| This is also optimizing for not renaming, just in a
| different way; also, you just said renaming was cheap, so
| which is it?
| Nevermark wrote:
| A good reason to use arbitrary code names before assigning a
| more helpful name upon release of something deemed to now be
| generally usable, beyond developers with caveats.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| Also, being too precise and succinct about what the tool does
| ends up in a race for the name in competing implementations.
|
| Project names should be unique enough to allow them becoming
| their Id,
|
| - It allows to find the project.
|
| - It allows the project to change, extend it's scope or narrow
| it.
|
| Having an Id is really important, making that Id related to the
| project's original intention is nice, but secondary. (as long
| as it doesn't change enough that it becomes misleading).
| the__alchemist wrote:
| If the community followed the author's guidance, we would have
| names like "Generic LLM wrapper 690" ("GLW690" if following the
| early programming language conventions.) or "Github clone with a
| different ideology 11"
| lr0 wrote:
| Not at all. You don't name by category, you can name by
| function or approach. PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database
| 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL). If your
| "LLM wrapper" does nothing distinctive worth naming, maybe
| don't publish it. But if it specifically handles streaming,
| call it something like "llm-stream-client." If it focuses on
| prompt templating, "prompt-template-engine." The name encodes
| the actual value proposition.
|
| I actually stated this on the post, but let me reiterate, I
| think that naming things in somehow fun way is totally okay as
| long as it stays relevant to what the tool actually does (you
| can have this achieved by play wording suffixes (Mongo"DB",
| Open"SSL", Ma"git" are good examples, all are better than
| elephant, dog, and beaver).
| hyperpape wrote:
| > PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the
| successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL).
|
| Indeed. This helps me know that I'm using a database more
| modern than Ingres. I chose not to use Oracle or SQL Server
| because they might have predated Ingres.
|
| Just one question: what's Ingres, and why do I care about it?
| Of course, I don't, which makes Postgres no more useful of a
| name than "fluffnutz" or "hooxup". That said, over time, I've
| come to like the name Postgres.
| lr0 wrote:
| You don't need to know what Ingres is. "PostgreSQL" still
| tells you it's SQL-related, which is infinitely more than
| "fluffnutz" tells you. And once you learn it's a database,
| the name reinforces that knowledge forever. Good luck
| remembering what "fluffnutz" does in 6 months.
| hyperpape wrote:
| That's a really nice mnemonic. I wish I lived in an
| alternate universe where Postgres was called PostgreSQL
| so that it was easier to remember. Perhaps if we start
| using that, it will take over, like how everyone calls
| the Go project Golang.
| lr0 wrote:
| https://www.postgresql.org
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL
| indymike wrote:
| Sometimes names have great value at the beginning of the
| project. In this case it explains exactly what the project
| is and will be... That said, marketing decisions like
| naming a product often don't age well.
| gipp wrote:
| Sure, but how many LLM streaming clients are out there?
|
| Namespacing, sure. But is "We use gh:someguy/openai/llm-
| streaming-client to talk to the backend" (x50 similarly
| cumbersome names in any architecture discussion) really
| better than "We use Pegasus as our LLM streaming client"?
| lr0 wrote:
| Nobody says "gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client" in
| conversation. You say "the streaming client" or "llm-
| stream" the same way you'd say "Pegasus." But when someone
| new joins or you're reading code, "llm-stream" is self-
| documenting. "Pegasus" requires looking it up every single
| time until you memorize an arbitrary mapping.
| debazel wrote:
| This sounds awful, now you'll be reading some
| documentation or comment about llm-stream where they
| didn't mention the full namespace, so you have no idea
| which of the 50 different llm-stream tools they're
| talking about, and on top of that you can't even search
| for it online.
| TOGoS wrote:
| Maybe, and I would definitely prefer this to the random-
| generic-word practice. "illuminate" is some part of Laravel,
| but I can't remember what it is, just that "that's not even a
| noun; they just picked that word for $whatever_crappy_subsystem
| because it sounds nice" and being even more annoyed at the
| whole thing because of it.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Yeah, this is a bit relative. Use microsoft tools/products
| (especially cloud/office) that came out in the past decade and
| you'll appreciate every other naming pattern.
|
| My subjective view is that names should be exotic, flamboyant,
| unique and generally wild when it comes to tools. sticking your
| company's name as a prefix into everything (or the flagship
| product's) is confusing and only hurts you.
| wpollock wrote:
| If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called
| "emacs" does?
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| An emergency bootable/rescue tool for Macs!
| Izkata wrote:
| "Mac OS through email" was what popped into my mind. No idea
| how that would work.
| pesus wrote:
| I still think of the short-lived Apple eMac when I read it.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| It's funny how they sold that into 2006, with a CRT still
| amelius wrote:
| They had to because the RDF was based on CRT technology,
| originally.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Uses eight megs of RAM and constantly swaps?
| ralferoo wrote:
| Maybe a geekbench from yesteryear. Back in the mists of time it
| was apocryphally known as "eight megs and continually
| swapping". But I guess that's a couple of orders of magnitude
| out nowadays.
| jolmg wrote:
| It's still to his point:
|
| > Even when engineers get creative, there's logic: a butterfly
| valve actually looks like butterfly wings. You can tell how the
| name relates to what it actually defines, and how it can be
| memorable.
|
| Editor MACroS still has a logic. It isn't just random.
| wat10000 wrote:
| A butterfly valve is a category of thing. The corresponding
| word for emacs would be "editor." That is entirely
| descriptive: an editor edits.
|
| Picking a _specific_ butterfly valve randomly from an
| internet search, I find one called the FNW FNWHPA1LSTG24.
|
| Product types and categories get generic names, specific
| products often get weird names. It's true in just about every
| field.
| jolmg wrote:
| Someone was probably the first to call their valve a
| butterfly valve.
|
| Emacs can also be taken to be a category of editors. There
| are multiple emacs-derived editors.
| ctoth wrote:
| > If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called
| "emacs" does?
|
| Hmm, this looks like a nonsense word, but sometimes words look
| like nonsense when you write them backwards, maybe it's a
| scame?
| gibsonsmog wrote:
| Based on the article headlines I've seen over the years, I
| don't think emacs users know what emacs does except "yes"
| 9rx wrote:
| If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called a
| "combine" does?
|
| Combine things? Nope. Its purpose is to separate things...
|
| Its not just the software industry.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I'm conflicted because you're not entirely wrong (that it's
| not just the software industry), but the name is because the
| combine combines steps that used to be separate.
|
| It's not actually badly named.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> I 'm conflicted_
|
| That's why I chose that specific example! What fun would
| there be in you not having to think about it?
| wat10000 wrote:
| More to the point, what does a John Deere S7 600 do, or a 310
| G-Tier, or a Z515E ZTrak? Emacs is an editor. That part is
| descriptive: an editor edits. The product name is not
| expected to describe what the product is. The general product
| category is what does that.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> The product name is not expected to describe what the
| product is._
|
| There are some exceptions, but the agriculture machinery
| industry has actually gotten pretty good at making the
| names useful, with reasonable consistency across brands. S7
| 600: 600 tells that it is a class 6 combine, which is a
| value farmers understand as it pertains to the combine's
| capacity. For tractors, the John Deere 8R 230 sees 8
| indicate a large row-crop frame, and 230 indicates a 230 HP
| engine. A New Holland T7.180 is, you guessed it, a medium
| row-crop frame with a 180 HP engine.
|
| It may look like nothing to outsiders, but there is a lot
| of useful information encoded in there once you know what
| to look for.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Useful if you already know the basics of what it is. My
| point is that "S7 600" by itself doesn't tell you
| anything if you don't have some knowledge of the product
| already. The knowledge that it's a combine is separate.
| Similarly, "emacs" tells you nothing if you don't know
| it, but the generic term "editor" is descriptive.
|
| Software doesn't generally encode product attributes into
| the name the way 230 means 230 horsepower and such, but
| that's because software doesn't really have things like
| that to put in the name in the first place. Most software
| doesn't have specific variants like that, and software
| that does is almost always differentiated on feature set
| rather than numbers.
| 9rx wrote:
| Software often puts the version in the name. Which is the
| same as the S7 designation in the case of said combine.
| S7 is just a restyled S7x0 series combine, which was the
| successor to the S6x0 series.
|
| It's not a perfect system. Before the S6x0 was the
| 9x70STS series, after the 9x60STS series, and the 9x50STS
| series. You can find a version number in there, albeit
| not a perfectly sequential one. Although that's nothing
| new. Windows 3.1 turned 3.11, 95, 98. iOS 17 turned 26.
| You get the picture.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Technically it's a "combine harvester" as far as I know,
| which is more intuitive. Though in practice everyone calls it
| a "combine".
| 9rx wrote:
| Technically it is "combine". Originally it was known as a
| "combined harvester-thresher", which is maybe what you're
| thinking of, but that was soon shortened to "combine" and
| it has stuck ever since.
|
| "Combine harvester" showed up in some places later where
| context was needed to figure out what "combine" means, but
| it was seemingly only for context. "Combined harvester-
| thresher harvester" is pointlessly redundant.
| formula1 wrote:
| One issue with package naming is competition. One of the great
| things about OSS or software in general is people can take
| inspiration from other projects that do the same thing.
| Personally I've ran into deciding which casting library to use
|
| - runtypes - https://github.com/runtypes/runtypes
|
| - zod - https://zod.dev/
|
| - ajv - https://ajv.js.org/
|
| AJV and runtypes use the naming convention that the article
| suggestions. It's named is derived from how it's used. Zod on the
| other hand seems to come from left field.
|
| Personally, I built a simple caster called "ShallowCaster" before
| choosing to move to a library as things got move complex but I
| think a problem is that as competition increases the "generic"
| naming becomes more difficult to find.
|
| I suppose an option is to include the author name for each
| package such as "json casting from google" or "@google/json-
| casting" this way all packages can use the descriptive naming
| while not conflicting
| jameshart wrote:
| > naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or
| random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable
| professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually
| any other technical field.
|
| Really? Have you specced a microprocessor lately? Seen what
| pharmaceuticals are called? How polymer compound materials get
| named?
| lr0 wrote:
| The "Raptor Lake" codename in microprocessors is internal, the
| product ships with systematic designation. Engineers spec chips
| by model numbers that encode generation, tier, and performance
| class.
|
| In Pharmaceuticals, Doctors prescribe "sildenafil," not
| "Viagra." The generic name describes chemical structure. Brand
| names are marketing for consumers, not professional
| nomenclature.
|
| Mythology in chemistry/astronomy has centuries of legacy and
| connects to human cultural history. Calling an element
| "Titanium" after Titans carries weight. Calling a SQL
| replicator "Marmot" connects to... what, exactly? A weekend at
| the zoo?
| nemomarx wrote:
| But the names we're talking about are the ones used to market
| software to users? I don't see how the same logic doesn't
| apply
| ralferoo wrote:
| "Raptor Lake" isn't an internal codename, it's very much
| external as it's what Intel actively referred to that
| generation as. How's a non-geek shopping for a PC going to
| know if it's better or worse than "Lunar Lake" or "Alder
| Lake"? Maybe they just think their machine is shipping with
| some game where your giant dinosaur bird thing has to stop
| off for a quick drink to regain energy.
|
| But in any case, this isn't the real travesty with these
| names. It's that they're reusing existing common words. The
| article hates on "google" when actually it's a fantastic name
| - if you googled it when it was introduced, all the results
| were about what you wanted. By comparison, Alphabet is an
| awful name, because if you search for Alphabet only a tiny
| subset of the results are going to be useful to you.
| bgbntty2 wrote:
| > Doctors prescribe "sildenafil," not "Viagra".
|
| Depends on the location, I guess. I've had doctors prescribe
| trade names, which I don't understand if there are
| alternatives with the same dosage, route of administration
| and similar inactive ingredients. Not even talking about the
| "do not substitute" prescriptions which are also based on
| dubious information most of the time.
|
| As for "sildenafil" - I don't think generic names are usually
| meaningful. Usually the suffix relates to the category of the
| drug, but the first letters seem as random as the letters in
| trade names. I could imagine a world where the generic name
| is viagrafil and the trade name is Silden.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Naming schemes in consumer marketing serve a function. They
| are easily identifiable, unique, and memorable. All of these
| properties serve to identify the thing by associating a
| unique name with a unique set of services/function/effects on
| use.
|
| Medical and chemical terminology is built on the history of
| latinate terms and compounds whose simples follow the same
| pattern. Latinate terms, I might add, which reference
| mythical, fantastical, or unusual things. Consider the planet
| Mercury, for example. The only difference? The centuries of
| time it took for scientific evolution to turn these unique
| names into a taxonomical language with its own logic.
|
| There is no such taxonomy for computer science. But in the
| course of the evolution of such a taxonomy, it will be built
| out of the mess of names like the ones we like to use for our
| programs and tools like Rust, Ocaml (notice combination of
| interesting and technical), git, npm, bun, ada, scipy, etc
| etc.
| ctoth wrote:
| > There's an odd tendency in modern software development; we've
| collectively decided that naming things after random nouns,
| mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters
| is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career
| suicide in virtually any other technical field.
|
| I'm charmed by the lack of truth in this beautiful sentence. Top
| of mind for me, at least.
| NotGMan wrote:
| >> Early programming languages followed similar logic: FORTRAN
| (Formula Translation), COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language),
| BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), SQL
| (Structured Query Language), I believe Lisp stands for list
| processing. The pattern was clear: names conveyed purpose or
| origin.
|
| "names conveyed purpose or origin.": no they don't. If I use the
| authors example of the two people talking: as if saying "BASIC"
| instead of "Cobra" explained the meaning anything better to a
| person who never used BASIC.
|
| I've been programming for 15 years+ and never used basic due to
| my age and I never know, until today, that BASIC stands for
| "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code".
|
| Why? Because I don't need to know and it doesn't make the usage
| of BASIC anything different.
| fusslo wrote:
| are you guys naming your products?
|
| We have an internal name and our product name. Internal names
| start as something that describes the project/repo/tool. Then
| within 18 months the name no longer makes sense so we rename it
| to some random name - state names, lake names, presidents,
| mountains, etc. It's just a placeholder.
|
| The public facing product name is a compromise of marketing,
| trademark, and what gets approved by the CEO. Even the company
| name might change in startup world. No joke: the startup next
| door had to change their name because it was too masculine, and
| they realized more than half their projected market was women.
| Spivak wrote:
| This is the way, you name things random words devoid of all
| connection to software because you don't want to confuse people
| later when the scope grows or changes.
|
| Well so in the beginning we only supported email notifications
| which is why it's called EmailServ but over time it grew into a
| robust and pretty general queueing service so now it handles
| all our background task processing. Sending emails is actually
| handled by EmailWorker but EmailServ still supports its
| original API which now uses EmailWorker behind the scenes if
| you prefer that.
| anthk wrote:
| - VTL-O2
|
| - Forth
|
| - Grep
|
| - CVS (I'm not an American but you can relate)
|
| - Clang
|
| Altough MS products can be as opaque if not more. And let's not
| talk about IBM...
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| The problem with descriptive names is that they start descriptive
| but then become proper nouns. At a former employer in the Fortune
| 100 outside the software industry, everything started with a
| descriptive name, that then became an acronym. And as every
| project and tool inevitably developed its own idiosyncrasies, the
| descriptive name pretty soon didn't tell you anything useful
| about the project at all.
|
| It is an unavoidable reality that knowing something's name gives
| you very, very little information about what that something is.
| That's what sentences are for.
| alienbaby wrote:
| I have agreed with this for at least a decade. Name your things
| in a way related to what they do.
|
| What does chef do? Garden? Pig? Burp?
|
| Nonsense.
| fph wrote:
| Like GMail addresses, all the good names are taken.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Idk about open source tools, but internal corporate things have
| codenames for good reasons.
| notpachet wrote:
| "First we have to build a Bingo service. See, Bingo knows
| everyone's name-o..."
|
| - 'Microservices' sketch by Krazam
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
| dmurvihill wrote:
| You can really track the progression of Krazam's career based
| on what videos he puts out
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| The author should read up on the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein or maybe
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface both of which are
| actually scientifically important things.
|
| Amiga famously had a custom ASIC called "Fat Gary"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_custom_chips
|
| I really could go on about this. Names are only useful for
| distinct identification. They need to be distinct within their
| domain. Otherwise they're just an index into a list.
| lr0 wrote:
| Sonic hedgehog is a terrible example this case. Researchers
| literally had to tell parents their children had mutations in
| the "sonic hedgehog gene." The scientific community recognized
| this was a problem and it's a widely-known controversy. It's
| cited as an example of bad naming in medical ethics
| discussions.
|
| Boaty McBoatface? officials overrode the vote to name it after
| David Attenborough. The actual research submarine got the joke
| name. Again, this proves my point.
|
| Fat Gary was an internal chip designation that never needed to
| be public-facing. Perfectly fine.
|
| "Names are only for distinct identification" if efficiency was
| not at a question. Why use worse identifiers when better ones
| cost the same?
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| <tangent>
|
| What is it with a number of blogs recently that have turned off
| normal right-click behavior, and probably related, the scroll
| behavior is awful.
|
| This is one, and as soon as I scroll on my work high powered
| Macbook and it's not smooth, I'm out.
| lr0 wrote:
| [OP] Can you please doublecheck? Nothing should affect right-
| click behavior or scroll, if you're experiencing it, it's
| probably from your end.
| irusensei wrote:
| I am more frustrated by the fact browsers allow such
| manipulation such as this and some clipboard operations.
| arscan wrote:
| > "But memorable names help with marketing!"
|
| > Sure, if you're building a consumer product. Your HTTP client,
| cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product.
| The people who will ever care about it just want to know what it
| does.
|
| ----
|
| It sounds like the author doesn't view themselves as a consumer
| in this relationship, that they are immune to marketing, and that
| what they are advocating for isn't just another marketing tactic.
| I'm not sure if any of those are true.
|
| My experience with areas that use functional names to describe
| things is that you end up in a sea of acronyms (the functional-
| based names are a mouthful!) and you end in an arguably worse
| situation (did you say ABDC or ADBC, those are two completely
| different things).
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I agree. I've worked in places that discourage "cute" names and
| the result is often things like having to decide between using
| CoreMainHttp and MainHttpCore. Or worse, two things with
| exactly the same name, but two different APIs, with projects
| sometimes taking both as a dependency at the same time. Or even
| obsolete parts of the org chart encoded into dependency names,
| like "DataOrgUtils" when the "Data Org" stopped existing
| several reorgs ago, when our current VP was an intern and
| nobody else even worked here.
|
| Without some central control of names though, even "cute" ones
| tend to converge on the same handful eventually: Phoenix (and
| other classical allusions like Plato's Cave, etc.),
| Keymaster/MCP (and other 80s childrens' movie references),
| Simpsons characters, Star {Trek,Wars} references. These are all
| attractors for the kind of people that tend to be in IT/SWE
| even if the actual namespace (all possible ASCII-expressable
| words) is much larger.
| taeric wrote:
| I find the remark that we give things names more as a word play
| than purpose.... kind of amusing? Like, of course people will
| find a way to play with the tools they have. And in programming,
| that is often words. Because what else would it be?
|
| By far the worst aspect of the nerd ecosystem is the odd belief
| that pops up every so often that names should matter. In every
| ecosystem, there is usually some odd idea that it is only in
| their world that people abuse this.
|
| Just skim through that list of things that are unexpectedly named
| after people. Sure, you can get upset about Shell's sort not
| having any relation to shells. Or Bloom's filter not having a
| phase where the data "blooms" into use. But you would have the
| same issue with French drains. Or how gaslighting has nothing to
| do with lighting things on fire using gas and the affect that
| will have.
|
| Honestly, I think this would be a fun list to just keep going.
| Akin to the old Chuck Norris joke generators.
| andrewl wrote:
| I strongly agree with this. And what bothers me more than obscure
| or meaningless names like Viper are silly and embarrassing names
| like Hunchentoot. Names like that sometimes cause people to
| dismiss good software. It's like using Comic Sans in a serious
| research paper.
|
| One area of the sciences does partly use names like this, and
| that is biology. Biologists do sometimes name a species after a
| famous person, as in the louse _Strigiphilus garylarsoni_ :
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigiphilus_garylarsoni
| thundergolfer wrote:
| My old company Canva, was pretty good about this and I'm bringing
| that to the culture at my current place.
|
| Krazam has excellently parodied this unserious naming indulgence
| of programmers[1]. "See, Bingo knows everyone's name-O. So we get
| the user ID from there." Racoon, Wingman, EKS (Entropy Chaos
| Service), RGS, Barbie Doll, Ringo-2.
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ?si=QkI-TPStI9I4RtAB&t=33
| irusensei wrote:
| >Every person who encounters your "fun" name pays a small tax.
| Across the industry, these taxes compound into significant waste
|
| >Reserve the creative names for end-user products where branding
| matters. For infrastructure, tools, and libraries, choose
| clarity. Every time.
|
| Ah yes the software I am giving away for free must go easy on the
| minds of the poor VCs and business drones who are extracting
| value from it.
| groby_b wrote:
| Wait till you work in a corporate environment, where Project
| Fuzzy Mustard triggered a violation of the ElastoFish metric in
| the Yellow Hills subsystem, leading to a Code Mild Lavender with
| a side of Pink Sprinkles.
| indymike wrote:
| I worked in one that had lettuce, tomato and celery in the
| stack.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| We have a boulangerie and a fromagerie
| jackvalentine wrote:
| I no shit once worked on 'Project Magenta Lobster'.
| m3047 wrote:
| As they say in physics: color and charm may change, but up and
| down are forever.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >There's an odd tendency in modern software development; we've
| collectively decided that naming things after random nouns,
| mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters
| is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career
| suicide in virtually any other technical field.
|
| Odd? Modern? I started working professionally in 2005 and
| everything had silly names. The DNS server was named athena
| instead of c302r5s1 or whatever building/room/rack/position name.
| I once rebooted a server that had an uptime of 12 years, so it
| had been running since 1993... it indeed had a silly name.
| Everything had silly names, usually types of things had a theme.
|
| >Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering,
| where people there maintain even stricter discipline. IUPAC
| nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes
| exactly one molecule. 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.
|
| How about piranha? aqua regia? Up/Down/Strange/Charm quarks?
| Gluons? Like a third of the elements named after people or
| places.
|
| Curium, Einsteinium, Fermium, Mendelevium, Nobelium, Lawrencium,
| Rutherfordium, Seaborgium, Bohrium, Meitnerium, Roentgenium,
| Copernicium, Flerovium, Oganesson -- I guess none of these people
| were named Steve, but you get the point
|
| These tendencies are OLD and EVERYWHERE. IUPAC names are just a
| convenient way to serialize data.
| bighead1 wrote:
| counterpoints:
|
| pascal, eiffel, ada, C, APL, dylan
| gherkinnn wrote:
| JavaScript
| Lerc wrote:
| Past projects of mine. 'pedes Glook
| Fitznik Plops Gyralight I wanted a new
| tower defence game: So I made one
|
| Oh and https://lerc.itch.io/namesarehardpart5
|
| The examples given for real world things The Golden Gate Bridge
| and The Hoover Dam, are instances of things. Things that the
| class of which they belong is old enough that Dam and Bridge are
| not new words.
|
| If you are making new things you need a new name. Software is
| inherently new because computers have been in wide use for only a
| few decades. Instances of software rarely even get names, just
| numbers, with project names or nicknames attached. I'd be willing
| to bet both The Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover dam had project
| names or nicknames.
| lordleft wrote:
| I am highly sympathetic to this sentiment, but I think it's hard
| to name things in software because a) it's easy for the obvious
| names to get overloaded and b) many of the things we are dealing
| with are basically abstract relationships with arbitrary
| properties.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I think the author is ignoring the difference between Branding
| and several other categories, like technical terms and their
| common names.
|
| The adjustable wrench is named straightforwardly, but most
| English speakers know it as the _monkey_ wrench. In some European
| languages its name translates to "French wrench" or "the French"
| (as in: French person), in others it's "English wrench" even
| though those two were originally just variants of the adjustable
| wrench.
|
| Point is, all those goofy names are brands that may or may not
| stick around for longer and the terms for what they actually do
| are more descriptive.
|
| My favourite example: BlueJeans. A videoconferencing platform.
| Why is it named like that? We might never know, but most likely
| partly to stand out, but there's a clear distinction between the
| brand name and the more descriptive terms used to tell what it
| does.
| scoopdewoop wrote:
| > programming shifted from corporate mainframe work to the
| community builders > which is good
|
| but then:
|
| > Our field deserves better than a zoo of random nouns
| masquerading as professional nomenclature
|
| Okay? So is this professional nomenclature or the work of
| community builders?
|
| I think: everyone should code, it should not be an elitist
| profession, we don't need to all accommodate busy professionals,
| i'm fine with corporate users having to say my stupid package
| name at work.
|
| > Your fun has externalities. Every person who encounters your
| "fun" name pays a small tax. Across the industry, these taxes
| compound into significant waste
|
| Someone please get this guy a bong rip.
| tuveson wrote:
| It's all fun and games until you have to be like "blastoise
| deleted our database backups"
| myk9001 wrote:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
| zcw100 wrote:
| Why does it have to be all or nothing? How about a clever name or
| two for marketing that stands out and doesn't get lost in a
| sentence "I'm not asking you to search, I'm asking you to use the
| search command" but not obnoxiously over done where everything is
| named after some Norse god or some other silliness.
| chagaif wrote:
| Love this:
|
| > Name your library after what it does. Use compound terms.
| Embrace verbosity if necessary. http-request-validator is
| infinitely superior to "zephyr" when someone is scanning
| dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.
| taylodl wrote:
| And forty years ago, I was using a tool called Brief, which was a
| product from UnderWare. I was also using a librarian named
| Marian.
| ux266478 wrote:
| > Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a
| consumer product.
|
| I'm not sure how the author came to this conclusion.
|
| At any rate, programmers aren't any worse about this than
| mathematicians. Just replace [fictional name] with some foreign
| word or philosophical term that's justified with the most insane
| mental gymnastics you've ever heard of. Given some historical
| native speaker of Latin, do you think they're going to know what
| a matrix is for? No, because the word means "uterus". There is no
| connection to "tabular shorthand of linear transformations."
|
| I think it's clear the author is writing this to vent
| frustration, but I think they've misidentified the actual
| problem:
|
| > http-request-validator is infinitely superior to "zephyr" when
| someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production
| incident.
|
| My jaw hit the floor reading this. The idea there are people out
| there debugging codebases without knowing something as
| foundational as the dependencies is beyond absurd to me. That's
| insane and horrifying, overshadowing pretty much the entire blog
| post. Does anyone else live like this? How do you tolerate these
| conditions? _Why_ would you tolerate these conditions?
| davidfekke wrote:
| The two hardest things to do in computer science is knowing when
| to invalidate cache and how to name things.
| 9rx wrote:
| And off-by-one errors.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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_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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Also 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.
| kace91 wrote:
| >I think the author makes a hard distinction between consumer
| products and infrastructure/engineering products.
|
| Which is really funny considering he talks about emacs.
| moregrist wrote:
| > > 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.
| benrutter wrote:
| > Our field deserves better than a zoo of random nouns
| masquerading as professional nomenclature. Clarity isn't boring,
| it's respect for your users' time and cognitive resources.
|
| I felt a little guilty at first, I maintain a project called
| Wimsey (it's a data testing library but you couldn't guess that)
| and at work my team regularly enjoys fun/silly names.
|
| Trying to defend myself, I was thinking about various logical
| responses to this article: non-descriptive names don't become out
| of place when a projects goals drift; descriptive names will lead
| to repitition; etc.
|
| If I'm honest though, I think I _just like_ software to have a
| sense, even a tiny one, of enjoyment.
|
| The software I use everyday, like Cron (named after a greek god
| of time); Python (named after a comedy act) and Zellij (names
| after a tiling craft) all have fun, joyful names that tell me
| someone loved and cared about these projects when they built
| them.
|
| I need to learn these tools beyond just "x does y category of
| thing" anyway, so I don't mind learning these names. And it makes
| software engineering just a bit more fun than using "unix-
| scheduler", "object-oriented-scripting-lang" or "terminal-
| display-manager".
|
| I love working in a field where people are passionate about their
| craft. Stern professionalism doesn't sound like something I want
| to trade that for.
|
| It's a human trait to name the things we love, that's the exact
| reason why pets typically have names like "cookie" and not
| "brown-dog-2".
| general1465 wrote:
| I always get stuck into .NET naming structure
| Project.Parser.Pcapng, it is great for projects, but it is
| utterly useless for standalone naming
| kixiQu wrote:
| I believe strongly in this counterargument:
|
| https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam...
|
| Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so
| projects will evolve such that they are not _accurately_
| descriptive after time.
|
| (Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized
| ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X
| Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Service"
| simultaneously, and then have to rely on a lot of thick context
| to know what the distinctions are)
| plorkyeran wrote:
| > grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger,
| Kernighan; the creators' initials), sed (stream editor), cat
| (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these
| names were either functional descriptions or systematic
| derivations.
|
| If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought
| each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would
| have even the slightest chance of guessing. It's ridiculous to
| complain about "libsodium" and then hold up "awk" as a _good_
| name.
| mojuba wrote:
| However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't
| ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.
| jolmg wrote:
| That's part of the point, I believe. It's not about being
| always able to guess the function from first sight. It's also
| about the function and name serving as mnemonic to each other
| once you understand how it got named.
| bigiain wrote:
| I think perhaps the articles argument gets less strong
| then?
|
| It's claimed grep is "well named" because even though it's
| not obvious when you first read it, that it being a
| contraction for "global reg ex print" and hence memorable.
| I'm not sure the same argument can't be made for libsodium
| which assuming the reader is familiar with NaCl (the same
| as the assumption that the previous reader is familiar with
| regex) then it's an equally memorable name for your crypto
| library.
|
| There's always a consideration about the context the name
| is intended and likely to be used in. The article mentions
| engineering naming and "ibeam", but engineering has it's
| own technical names an jargon as well. Most people wont
| know what "4130 tube" means, but people who build bicycle
| frames or roll cages will - and they're likely to use the
| less specific term "chromoly" if the don't need to
| distinguish between 4130 and 4145.
|
| In my head "libsodium" is similar - if you don't know what
| it (and NaCl) mean, you 100% should keep out of that part
| of the codebase.
| jolmg wrote:
| Names fall on a spectrum on this argument. Sodium is not
| really random because of the use of "salt" on crypto.
| It's like saying that libsodium is part of your crypto.
| awk is more random.
|
| The argument goes stronger with projects where the
| creator seemed to just roll the dice with the name.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| "libsodium" -> "salt" -> "salting is something tangentially
| related to cryptography" is significantly better as a
| mnemonic than "awk stands for the author's initials".
| bigiain wrote:
| Same for grep - with, I guess, the proviso/assumption that
| you know what regular expression means, which might have been
| a fair assumption for the sort of people who had command line
| access to Unix systems in the 70s/80s, but may no longer be
| valid for developers under 30 who grew up with Windows and
| were perhaps trained in 6 or 26 week "bootcamps" that didn't
| have time to cover historical basics like that?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you
| won 't ever forget it._
|
| I feel like this is approximately the third time I'm learning
| this.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| lol no. There are literally a hundred plus Unix tools and
| commands. I couldn't tell you what 90% of them mean. I sure
| as hell couldn't have told you what sed stood for. And if you
| asked me tomorrow I also wouldn't be able to tell you.
|
| C programmers are great. I love C. I wish everything had a
| beautiful pure C API. But C programmers are strictly banned
| from naming things. Their naming privileges have been
| revoked, permanently.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It also seems wrong? libsodium explains the logic in its name
| right on its about page. It's a fork of NaCL (the chemical
| formula for sodium salt), which itself is a plain acronym for
| "networking and cryptography library." Google doesn't seem like
| a good example, either. Wasn't that meant to be an allusion to
| the very large number googolplex, as in Google exists to tame
| the unfathomably large amount of information on the web? The
| author may or may not like those names, but they have a logic
| just like grep and awk do.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm not sure I like awk, sed, or cat, I think these are just
| names we're used to, not good really. diff seems ok.
|
| grep almost has an onomatopoeic nature to it... like, it sounds
| like you are grabbing or ripping the patterns out of the file,
| right?
| queenkjuul wrote:
| End of the day you know what it means or you don't. I agree it's
| helpful when a name is descriptive, but there's no helping the
| fact that you're going to have to learn the names of things that
| aren't obvious. Purely utilitarian names would constantly
| collide.
|
| I also think they overestimate how distinct terminology is in
| other fields. Even their example of the I-beam is also known as
| an H beam or an RSJ depending on who you're talking to. I don't
| find it hard to imagine a mechanic referring to one of their
| specialty tools by the name of its manufacturer, either.
|
| Regardless, the battle was lost before it started. There has
| never been good consistent descriptive naming as standard in
| computing; there was no plot to lose.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| This reads like an extensive, and frankly exhausting,
| rationalisation of a personal preference. Personal preferences
| are fine, I have my own. But please stop thinking they apply
| universally.
|
| Laravel works better than Rails-but-PHP. Ruby on Rails beats
| Opinionated-One-Person-Stack-Using-Ruby and I'm fine with the
| name Ruby as well.
|
| I shall name my next product larmn in honour of OP.
| amelius wrote:
| One more reason why Windows is better than OS X.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Descriptive names are great until the thing you built starts
| evolving and doing more or less than the description and then is
| way more confusing that calling something somewhat general like
| my favorite of all time: 'Conformity Beaver'. The same goes for
| teams. Mythical creatures are good because they are fun and also
| allow the team to evolve its mandate and custodianship and may
| also help with Conways Law.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Irrelevant. LLMs know all the names. In 1 year they will be doing
| all the SSHing and terminaling.
|
| Quickly: name the AVX2 instructions that the compiler emits for
| math calculations
| IshKebab wrote:
| Preach! The worst excuse I hear is "but if we have a meaningless
| name it can't become inaccurate later when the project changes!".
|
| Uhm yeah. That's like saying "if stab myself to death now I can't
| die of dementia in old age!"
|
| Edit: look, it's here!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237390
| Beestie wrote:
| First it was racehorses. Then it was prescription medications.
| Then software.
|
| I hope this goes no further.
| hyperbolablabla wrote:
| I understand the counterarguments, but I agree viscerally with
| the arc of this argument. My company has a client who's named
| there services random names like Chuck and Phobos -- absolutely
| no inkling about it what they do, and when my colleagues talk
| about them they may as well be talking Greek. The client I work
| with names our backend services functionally, like "Royalties" or
| "Workstation", and navigating the org as a newcomer was way
| easier for me.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I can't call my new formula translation language FORTRAN because
| it's been taken, as have many other names. So now to avoid
| collisions, it's named after my cat.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| C
|
| C post increment
|
| See sharp
| dwaltrip wrote:
| The author is vastly overestimating the general legibility and
| familiarity of things they happen to know well and are used to.
|
| Boring names are also very generic, by definition, and thus often
| harder to remember. Especially when there are 10 other similar
| tools. Is it sql-validator, sql-schema-validator, schema-
| validate, db-validator, or god knows what else?
|
| Edit: I am in favor of better "sub titles" / descriptive slugs /
| and so on. As well as names that are a hybrid of creative and
| descriptive. Sqlalchemy is a good example.
|
| Why isn't there a command line utility called "whatisthis" with a
| standard protocol that allows tools to give a brief description
| of what they are?
|
| It could be extended to package managers as well. E.g "pip
| whatisthis foo_baz".
|
| Shit we should create this...
| p4ul wrote:
| This might not be exactly what you mean by a CLI app called
| "whatisthis", but I have been using cheat.sh and the pattern
| below for a few years. It works really well!
|
| curl cheat.sh/grep # fetches brief grep cheat sheet
| Arubis wrote:
| Just name everything Phoenix.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Once again proving that there are two very hard problems in
| software engineering: Naming things, cache invalidation, and off-
| by-one errors.
| casey2 wrote:
| LMAO ok dude, don't like it? fork it and change the name. The
| author has a DEEP misunderstanding of the science of human
| language, not surprised he's a Chomskyite.
|
| Rule of thumb, disregard every post that uses the phrase "context
| switching"
| jollyllama wrote:
| Unfortunately this article misses the worst failure of naming:
| name collisions.
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah, if we followed this advice every language would have four
| different packages named http-client.
| keybored wrote:
| > The cognitive tax
|
| > Every obscure name is a transaction cost levied on every
| developer who encounters it.
|
| It's not a mental burden, it's a cognitive tax. Moreover it's a
| transaction cost? Levied on people? Which loads their RAM?
|
| Where's the simple everyday English?
| keybored wrote:
| Anyway. We used MongoDB for a good while.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Why is Go a very silly name and not Python, C, Rust, or literally
| any programming language name?
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| > This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical
| field.
|
| The cognitive load is unavoidable and in some ways worse in
| industries with highly technical names.
|
| At one point in my career I was an engine calibrator at a large
| automotive OEM. Our lexicon included physics industry terms
| (BMEP, BTDC, VVT, etc), a large software package where _every_
| variable, table, and function was an acronym (we had about 75k
| tunable parameters, each with an acronym), and all the internal
| company jargon and acronyms you 'd expect in a large corporation.
| But every name was as technical and functional as the author
| would desire.
|
| During my first month I was _exhausted_. I would doze off in
| afternoon meetings or pass out in my car as soon as I pulled in
| the driveway. I finally mentioned this to a more senior coworker
| and his insight was that my brain was working overtime because it
| was busy learning another language. He was entirely right! The
| constant mental load was a very real and tangible load. He
| relayed an anecdote when he went to S. America on his honeymoon
| and despite him and his wife having taken ~4 years of HS /college
| Spanish the mental work they had to do to function basically
| nixed half the daily activities they had planned due to
| exhaustion. That was what I was experiencing.
|
| The idea that _more_ technical and specific names reduces mental
| load does not track with my experience. The complexity is
| intrinsic not incidental and I don 't think it has much to do
| with the specific names chosen.
| pvtmert wrote:
| I agree for internal names but disagree for public
| software/external names.
|
| I disagree for public/open-source software, because: So many
| kinds of software actually have good names. Yes they use mythical
| names but with the similar function or relatedness.
|
| Meanwhile, I agree for internal names, because: So many (legacy)
| code I worked with had terrible naming. This goes beyond only the
| names themselves but also their capitalization or consistency. I
| kid you not, in a $FAANG company I saw "SpidermanActivity" and
| "BatmanActivity" on a system that is used by Tier-1 services' on-
| calls.
|
| > (Although this thing was not a Tier-1 service, it was not also
| completely Tier-2 either, as it was actively supporting
| operations of Tier-1 services, depending on the incident, a
| downtime could cause significant problems...)
|
| Imagine you are trying to make sense of a large system, which has
| maybe tens of dependencies and as much of dependents, you are
| also trying to remember which API was Spiderman and how it
| related to the business at all...
|
| More on the naming conventions, the horrible case of acronyms
| (which spans outside of software engineering) and PMs creating
| polls/surveys for "fun names for our new shiny thing that does X
| but we don't wanna call it that".
|
| Going even lower-levels, engineers themselves are not careful. I
| had way too many CDK stacks named with not only varying dash vs
| underscore differences, but also with subtle "case-sensitivity"
| differences.
|
| Each year, I am solving issues of Java devs' issues. Some of
| being "but it works on my machine" type of problems. And
| significant percentage of that is most developers use a Mac &
| macOS. Hence the filesystem is case-insensitive by default. But
| the deployment target & CI being a Linux, filesystem is case-
| sensitive. As you can see here, The camel-case combined with
| inattentiveness can simply cause many hours of waste.
|
| > It's a plague.
|
| Yes, there is an AI slop, but there is also human sloppiness too.
| I am quite happy with LLMs/GenAI that it is able to catch and
| capture these and less prone to make such sloppiness in the first
| place. (As it being a "predictive-text engine", next word
| suggestion is a clone of existing copy of historically occurring
| words)
|
| At the same time, amount of "hallucinations" for various acronyms
| are staggering. Obviously I cannot expect otherwise. Even as a
| human, if I am missing the context, I would be either confused or
| plug-in something I already know...
| MisterTea wrote:
| I agree, some names that come to mind are Celery and Windows. But
| there are always silly names. I like Plan 9, an OS named after an
| Ed Wood B movie. Its sibling, Inferno is full of puns and
| references to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Its corporate
| dullards who insist that neutral boring is appealing to most and
| I again agree but its not a hard rule for me.
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