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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

(larr.net)
311 points todsacerdoti | 2 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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necovek ◴[12 Dec 25 02:04 UTC] No.46240043[source]▶
Even GNU is a recursive acronym, Emacs a convoluted one... What's Perl, Python, Java... all about? Remember how JavaScript was named? Don't mention Go (go-lang) or Pascal... Git, Mercurial, CVS anyone?

I believe this makes much ado about nothing.

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xxs ◴[12 Dec 25 07:19 UTC] No.46241676[source]▶
Java is easy - named after the coffee beans of the coffee they used to drink...

CVS (noticed already mentioned by a sibling comment) is just an abbreviation.

Python - well Monty Python

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1. eloisant ◴[12 Dec 25 08:40 UTC] No.46242111{3}[source]▶
Java was originally called Oak but its creator because he could see an oak from his office, but marketing people at Sun thought Java would be more catchy. Yes it's named after coffee beans, but it has no relation whatsoever to the language or the way it was created, it's just a marketing name.
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2. yard2010 ◴[12 Dec 25 10:49 UTC] No.46242868[source]▶
Imagine a parallel world in which Java is called Oak and it's actually nice from inception, not just like nice after decades.