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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

(larr.net)
311 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.405s | 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. pavel_lishin ◴[11 Dec 25 22:33 UTC] No.46238241[source]▶
> 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.

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2. embedding-shape ◴[11 Dec 25 23:22 UTC] No.46238768[source]▶
I've been using Linux for almost 20 years, including sed a lot of that time, I'm sure I've heard it before, I must have, but when parent wrote it I was like "aah, that makes sense".