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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

(larr.net)
311 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.223s | 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. homebrewer ◴[12 Dec 25 00:06 UTC] No.46239194[source]▶
Don't forget that you need to know English for that to work. I'm pretty sure most Unix users don't speak English (most computer users definitely don't). I interact with people who know few words besides "hello" and "goodbye", and for them "sed" is a nonsense term, just a set of letters randomly thrown together. Same as e.g. Excel, a random token that means nothing.

sed is just an example, of course, the author's point doesn't hold much weight for many (most?) users globally.