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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

(larr.net)
311 points todsacerdoti | 5 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.417s | source
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plorkyeran ◴[11 Dec 25 21:30 UTC] No.46237424[source]▶
> 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.

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mojuba ◴[11 Dec 25 21:40 UTC] No.46237555[source]▶
However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.
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1. jolmg ◴[11 Dec 25 21:47 UTC] No.46237653[source]▶
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.
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2. bigiain ◴[11 Dec 25 22:03 UTC] No.46237854[source]▶
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.

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3. pavel_lishin ◴[11 Dec 25 22:35 UTC] No.46238259[source]▶
"libsodium" -> "salt" -> "salting is something tangentially related to cryptography" is significantly better as a mnemonic than "awk stands for the author's initials".
4. jolmg ◴[11 Dec 25 22:40 UTC] No.46238322[source]▶
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.

5. foobarian ◴[11 Dec 25 23:56 UTC] No.46239079[source]▶
One additional complication with grep (and other CLI tools) is that the name itself is part of the day to day UX. It needs to be short, easy to say, and easy to type. With a library the API that is contained within serves the analogous role.