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330 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.233s | source
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plorkyeran ◴[] 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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QuercusMax ◴[] No.46238937[source]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libiberty was always my favorite ridiculous name. It was named so you can link it with -liberty.
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1. lmm ◴[] No.46240496[source]
A friend created a library called library which was kind of a converse to that (you had to link it with -lrary). It was funny for 30 seconds and then just annoying.