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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

(larr.net)
311 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.018s | 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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ekidd ◴[12 Dec 25 00:14 UTC] 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. sweetjuly ◴[12 Dec 25 04:47 UTC] No.46240961[source]▶
I always assumed part of the "data destroyer" folklore was from people flipping if/of by accident and destroying their data :)
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2. opan ◴[12 Dec 25 04:54 UTC] No.46240993[source]▶
I thought the more common mistake with dd was picking the wrong disk to write to (especially when using /dev/sdc type naming instead of /dev/disk/by-id/whatever naming). Flipping source/dest and overwriting data is a problem I associate with the tar command.
3. ◴[12 Dec 25 10:01 UTC] No.46242578[source]▶