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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: 0s | source
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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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saghm ◴[12 Dec 25 01:42 UTC] No.46239903[source]▶
In the same vein, my recollection is reading that the X windowing system is called X because it's the letter after "W", which was the original choice (because it's what the word "window" starts with), but it was already taken, so they went with X.
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1. anyfoo ◴[12 Dec 25 01:57 UTC] No.46240008[source]▶
It looks like X was deliberately chosen to denote succession of W, not clashing with it:

    "The name X derives from the lineage of the system. At Stanford University, Paul Asente and Brian Reid had begun work on the W window system [3] as an alternative to VGTS [13, 221 for the V system [5]. [...] We acquired a UNIX-based version of W for the VSlOO (with synchronous communication over TCP[24] produced by Asente and Chris Kent at Digital’s Western Research Laboratory. [...] It was also clear that, although synchronous communication was perhaps acceptable in the V system (owing to very fast networking primitives), it was completely inadequate in most other operating environments. X is our “reaction” to W."
-- https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/22949.24053