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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

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311 points todsacerdoti | 4 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.807s | source
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wpollock ◴[11 Dec 25 18:50 UTC] No.46235391[source]▶
If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?
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9rx ◴[11 Dec 25 19:08 UTC] No.46235698[source]▶
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.

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1. wat10000 ◴[11 Dec 25 19:14 UTC] No.46235786[source]▶
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.
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2. 9rx ◴[11 Dec 25 19:17 UTC] No.46235839[source]▶
> 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.

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3. wat10000 ◴[11 Dec 25 21:59 UTC] No.46237801[source]▶
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.

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4. 9rx ◴[11 Dec 25 22:09 UTC] No.46237928{3}[source]▶
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.