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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

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330 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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munificent ◴[11 Dec 25 20:35 UTC] No.46236775[source]▶
> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

This article would certainly disagree with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def...

> the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait.

Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?".

> The Hoover Dam is a dam, named after the president who commissioned it, not “Project Thunderfall” or “AquaHold.”

It was actually called the "Boulder Canyon Project" while being built, referred to as "Hoover Dam" even though finished during the Roosevelt administration, officially called "Boulder Dam", and only later officially renamed to "Hoover Dam".

The fact that Herbert Hoover initiated the project tells you nothing meaningful about it. Would "Reitzlib" be a better name than "Requests"?

> If you wrote 100 CLIs, you will never counter with a cobra.

But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc.

> No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

When you open your medicine cabinet, do you look for a jar labeled "acetylsalicylic acid", "2-propylvaleric acid", or "N-acetyl-para-aminophenol"? Probably not.

It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.

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moregrist ◴[11 Dec 25 22:54 UTC] No.46238475[source]▶
> > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

The author is just wrong. Chemistry is fairly jam-packed with various cutesy names either to amuse the authors or because they’re attempting to make an algorithm memorable to the field.

Off the top of my head:

- SHAKE and RATTLE: Bond constraint algorithms.

- CHARMm: An MD package but you’d never guess it from the name

- Amber: Another MD package that you’d never guess from the name.

- So so many acronyms from NMR: COSY, TOCSY, NOESY

The list goes on and on and permeates most of the subfields in one form or another.

If you want really cutesy names, though, look in molecular biology.

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1. gowld ◴[12 Dec 25 00:12 UTC] No.46239256[source]▶
Most of your examples are software!

Also SHAKE and RATTLE describe the motion-simulation in the algorithm.

Acronyms are abbreviations for meaningful names.

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2. smallnix ◴[12 Dec 25 00:24 UTC] No.46239352[source]▶
> Acronyms are abbreviations for meaningful names.

I think often words are added to allow for a memorable name, such as crispr

> When Mojica and Jansen struck up a correspondence, they began tossing around catchy names for the patterns, and on Nov. 21, 2001, they settled on CRISPR—an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.

https://nautil.us/the-unbearable-weirdness-of-crispr-236685/

3. moregrist ◴[12 Dec 25 03:26 UTC] No.46240552[source]▶
> Most of your examples are software!

Most of my examples are from computational chemistry, which is software, but (historically) written by chemists.

As one of those chemists (at least before my current work), I feel somewhat qualified to comment on my field and whether it always names things seriously or not.

But if you look around, fun terms are everywhere in chemistry or chemistry-adjacent fields. For example, PALM and STORM (from fluorescence microscopy) were almost certainly chosen because they were easy to remember.

> Also SHAKE and RATTLE describe the motion-simulation in the algorithm.

Not really. SHAKE and RATTLE are bond constraint algorithms to avoid simulating the fast degrees of freedom, typically in solvent.

In molecular dynamics, your time step is effectively set by the fastest degree of freedom (there’s a relationship with the Nyquist theorem here), so it pays to freeze out the vibrations of the O-H bonds in water when you’re simulating a larger system. SHAKE and RATTLE effectively freeze the bond and angle distances near equilibrium while allowing some relaxation.

The rest of the degrees of freedom are typically integrated with a larger time step using a method appropriate for the simulation ensemble (eg: one of the Verlet integrators, a Langevin integrator, etc).

> Acronyms are abbreviations for meaningful names.

Acronyms like XPS, EPR, NMR, etc are like that: dry, short, and meaningful.

But there are a lot that were chosen because they were entertaining to the authors or because they are easy to remember. Even in a technical field, marketing matters.