Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

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.

GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix".

Yacc stands for "Yet Another C Compiler".

Nano was originally TIP which stood for "TIP Isn't Pico" but was later changed to Nano so as not to conflict with another Unix utility called tip [0]. Presumably nano was chosen as the metric prefix next larger than pico.

Personally, I'd prefer choosing a random string of 3-8 letters for command line tools. At least that would be better than naming programs using generic names (Keep, Bamboo, Chef, Salt) which leads to all sorts of name collisions.

From the article:

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

The mascot for an $8.8T dollar (supply side) software industry, larger than Google, Microsoft and Apple combined, is a cartoon penguin [1].

"never had it in the first place" is absolutely correct.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_nano

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...

> "never had it in the first place" is absolutely correct.

To be clear: I didn't mean to imply this is a bad thing.

GNU's Not Unix, Pine Is Not Elm, TIP Isn't Pico all share one important characteristic — their audience is expected to know what Unix, Elm, Pico are, and saying "X is not Y" implies "X is specifically, deliberately an alternative to Y, in the same style as Y".

If you know what GNU and YACC are, you probably don't need to be told twice that "Bison" is GNU's YACC implementation — the pun makes it instantly memorable.

One of my personal favourites is Ubuntu's version naming scheme. The "alliterative animal" form is highly memorable, and gives you two different words to latch on to, either of which is enough to uniquely identify a version. The fact they're alphabetical also makes it easy to check which version is newer (Letter collisions happen on a 13-year cycle, which makes it highly unlikely to be a source of confusion).