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330 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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plorkyeran ◴[] 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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DSMan195276 ◴[] No.46238821[source]
Yeah this definitely falls into the category of "I use them so they feel natural", there's nothing amazing about those names.

The underlying problem is that you now run into so many named things (utilities, libraries, programs, etc.) in a day and they all have to differentiate themselves somehow. You can't name every crypto library `libcrypto` for obvious reasons.

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1. ◴[] No.46242675[source]