←back to thread

330 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
pdpi ◴[] 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.

replies(16): >>46239266 #>>46239267 #>>46239293 #>>46239675 #>>46239818 #>>46239903 #>>46240006 #>>46240043 #>>46240475 #>>46240516 #>>46240745 #>>46240858 #>>46240981 #>>46240986 #>>46242271 #>>46242669 #
necovek ◴[] 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.

replies(5): >>46240449 #>>46241400 #>>46241676 #>>46243053 #>>46243456 #
pdpi ◴[] No.46240449[source]
"Concurrent Versions/Versioning System" is a pretty reasonable one, though.
replies(1): >>46240591 #
necovek ◴[] No.46240591[source]
Then Gimp is also a great name, right? GNU-is-not-Unix Image Manipulation Program: immediatelly obvious what it does as soon as you learn what the acronym stands for.

Or Gtk even: Gnu-is-not-Unix Image Manipulation Program ToolKit (later changed to refer to Gnome instead of Gimp I believe).

replies(1): >>46242929 #
1. zem ◴[] No.46242929{3}[source]
and gdk was, delightfully enough, the gnu's not unix image manipulation program toolkit drawing kit