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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

(larr.net)
311 points todsacerdoti | 4 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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1. QuercusMax ◴[11 Dec 25 23:40 UTC] No.46238937[source]▶
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libiberty was always my favorite ridiculous name. It was named so you can link it with -liberty.
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2. MarsIronPI ◴[12 Dec 25 01:19 UTC] No.46239747[source]▶
Used to be that Ruby's "rubygems" library had an alias "ubygems" so that when invoking ruby with the -r option (to require a library) you could say "ruby -rubygems". Sadly, they seem to have removed this alias library sometime around Ruby 2.4.
3. lmm ◴[12 Dec 25 03:16 UTC] No.46240496[source]▶
A friend created a library called library which was kind of a converse to that (you had to link it with -lrary). It was funny for 30 seconds and then just annoying.
4. mr_mitm ◴[12 Dec 25 09:59 UTC] No.46242572[source]▶
There is also https://github.com/gebi/libowfat