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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

(larr.net)
311 points todsacerdoti | 17 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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pdpi ◴[12 Dec 25 00:03 UTC] No.46239164[source]▶
GNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of BCPL.

Developers haven't "lost the plot", we never had it in the first place.

Inversely, Clang, LLDB, jq, fzf, loc are modern projects perfectly in line with the author's notion of a good name. "mise-en-place" is the perfect metaphor for what mise does.

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1. anyfoo ◴[12 Dec 25 00:14 UTC] No.46239266[source]▶
> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for.

Data(set) Definition. But that name does not make any sense whatsoever by itself in this context, neither for the tool (it hardly "defines" anything), nor for UNIX in general (there are no "datasets" in UNIX).

Instead, it's specifically a reference to the DD statement in the JCL, the job control language, of many of IBM's mainframe operating systems of yore (let's not get into the specifics of which ones, because that's a whole other can of complexity).

And even then the relation between the DD statement and the dd command in UNIX is rather tenuous. To simplify a lot, DD in JCL does something akin to "opening a file", or rather "describing to the system a file that will later be opened". The UNIX tool dd, on the other hand, was designed to be useful for exchanging files/datasets with mainframes. Of course, that's not at all what it is used for today, and possibly that was true even back then.

This also explains dd's weird syntax, which consists of specifying "key=value" or "key=flag1,flag2,..." parameters. That is entirely alien to UNIX, but is how the DD and other JCL (again, of the right kind) statements work.

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2. necovek ◴[12 Dec 25 01:59 UTC] No.46240018[source]▶
Having come from the DOS world (or it could have been Norton utilities), I always thought it was more like DiskDupe (duplicate disks).

Funny how we never confirm our hypothesis that "checks out".

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3. anyfoo ◴[12 Dec 25 02:07 UTC] No.46240083[source]▶
"disk dump" is another common (but wrong) guess.
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4. softskunk ◴[12 Dec 25 02:19 UTC] No.46240156{3}[source]▶
I always read it as “[disk|data] destroyer”, because that’s what it’ll do if you’re not careful.
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5. ◴[12 Dec 25 02:56 UTC] No.46240367[source]▶
6. f33d5173 ◴[12 Dec 25 03:41 UTC] No.46240644[source]▶
I had remembered it was "convert and copy", but cc was already taken by the c compiler so they shifted it down a letter. That might have been apocryphal.
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7. Kevin-Xi ◴[12 Dec 25 04:22 UTC] No.46240841{3}[source]▶
One explanation that left a deep impression on me is[1]:

  it stands for 'Copy and Convert' and was renamed to `dd` only because `cc` was reserved for the C compiler!
[1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/6835/192313
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8. jaredhallen ◴[12 Dec 25 04:49 UTC] No.46240974{4}[source]▶
You know, this is true. And I've read any number of "you should never use dd, use this instead" articles over the years. But man, do I love me some dd.
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9. isoprophlex ◴[12 Dec 25 06:09 UTC] No.46241335[source]▶
I just remember it as "Da Disk", early 2000's nu metal lyrics-style, because it does mad things to da disk, yo.
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10. usefulcat ◴[12 Dec 25 06:22 UTC] No.46241388{4}[source]▶
Reminds me of IBM => HAL, just the other direction
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11. ◴[12 Dec 25 06:52 UTC] No.46241531[source]▶
12. classified ◴[12 Dec 25 07:44 UTC] No.46241805[source]▶
Same here. But I also seem to remember claims that this isn't true…
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13. f1shy ◴[12 Dec 25 08:13 UTC] No.46241962{3}[source]▶
I had it learned as "data duplicator" or something like that... seems also bogus.
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14. richardc323 ◴[12 Dec 25 08:17 UTC] No.46241977[source]▶
Ha, for the last 30 years I have been convinced it was Disk Direct.
15. georgefrowny ◴[12 Dec 25 08:35 UTC] No.46242087{5}[source]▶
dd is the software equivalent of removing the riving knife from a table saw.

Then again, I get very paranoid when I write software that has to delete arbitrary files recursively. One bad string gets in there and it's a very bad day.

16. bmacho ◴[12 Dec 25 09:53 UTC] No.46242536{5}[source]▶
APL -> BQN where the author remembered the alphabet wrong : https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/54753804#5...
17. ◴[12 Dec 25 10:09 UTC] No.46242621{4}[source]▶