Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

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)

I suppose it depends on your goals, but that scope restraint can be a good thing.

Do one thing, do it well, and while you're at it call yourself by the thing you do so you remember that's what you ought to be doing. A bit wordy for unix but you get the idea.

I’ve been told multiple times in multiple jobs that I’m good at naming things, and I love whimsical names. A couple rules I’ve internalized are:

- if it’s hard to name, that’s a good sign that you haven’t clearly delineated use case or set of responsibilities for the thing

- best case for a name is that it’s weird and whimsical on first encounter. Then when somebody tells you the meaning/backstory for the name it reveals some deeper meaning/history that makes it really memorable and cements it in your mind

- the single best tech naming thing I’ve encountered (I didn’t come up with it) was the A/B testing team at Spotify naming themselves “ABBA”

The winner takes it all!

> I’ve been told multiple times in multiple jobs that I’m good at naming things, and I love whimsical names.

As long as you're naming products and features, rather than variables.