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311 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.416s | source
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pdpi ◴[] 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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ekidd ◴[] No.46239267[source]
> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for.

Traditionally, according to folklore? "Delete disk" or "destroy data". (Because it was commonly used to write raw disk blocks.)

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1. QuantumNomad_ ◴[] No.46239594[source]
Another, similar name it is sometimes jokingly referred to under is “destroyer of disks”.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081206105906/http://www.noah.o...