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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: 0.016s | 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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HPsquared ◴[12 Dec 25 01:28 UTC] No.46239818[source]▶
Naming is a big part of programming, you'd expect software to have good descriptive names.
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1. swiftcoder ◴[12 Dec 25 09:14 UTC] No.46242293[source]▶
I think this runs into the intersection of the "code is art" and "code is a tool" crowds. I like to name my API methods with a little whimsy too...
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2. rahoulb ◴[12 Dec 25 10:08 UTC] No.46242613[source]▶
I remember writing a function to convert a string from snake case to camel case and calling it `humpify`. And another that would take a string and locate the constant with that name called `constantinople`.

But then, this is ruby and it's known for its unusual naming. Plus both also had sensible/boring aliases and they were for internal use only.