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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

(larr.net)
311 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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plorkyeran ◴[11 Dec 25 21:30 UTC] 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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mojuba ◴[11 Dec 25 21:40 UTC] No.46237555[source]▶
However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.
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forrestthewoods ◴[11 Dec 25 22:59 UTC] No.46238519[source]▶
lol no. There are literally a hundred plus Unix tools and commands. I couldn’t tell you what 90% of them mean. I sure as hell couldn’t have told you what sed stood for. And if you asked me tomorrow I also wouldn’t be able to tell you.

C programmers are great. I love C. I wish everything had a beautiful pure C API. But C programmers are strictly banned from naming things. Their naming privileges have been revoked, permanently.

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wombatpm ◴[11 Dec 25 23:21 UTC] No.46238756[source]▶
Relevant XKCD

Https://xkcd.com/1168/

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WJW ◴[12 Dec 25 00:06 UTC] No.46239193[source]▶
Someone once tried this on me during Friday drinks and I successfully conquered the challenge with "tar --help". The challenger tried in vain to claim that this was not valid, but everyone present agreed that an exit code of zero meant that it was a valid solution.
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tolciho ◴[12 Dec 25 05:06 UTC] No.46241039{3}[source]▶

  $ tar --help
  tar: unknown option -- -
  usage: tar {crtux}[014578beFfHhjLmNOoPpqsvwXZz]
             [blocking-factor | format | archive | replstr]
             [-C directory] [-I file] [file ...]
         tar {-crtux} [-014578eHhjLmNOoPpqvwXZz] [-b blocking-factor]
             [-C directory] [-F format] [-f archive] [-I file]
             [-s replstr] [file ...]
  $ echo $?
  1
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pharrington ◴[12 Dec 25 08:07 UTC] No.46241933{4}[source]▶
That is not GNU tar's output. You might wanna make sure your installation is ok.

edit: maybe i missed the joke?

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1. lloeki ◴[12 Dec 25 09:39 UTC] No.46242454{5}[source]▶
> maybe i missed the joke?

the bomb specifies only "unix" so you can't assume GNU (which, aha, is Not Unix)