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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

(larr.net)
353 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 11 Dec 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.398s | 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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necovek ◴[12 Dec 25 02:04 UTC] 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.

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1. johnnyanmac ◴[12 Dec 25 12:22 UTC] No.46243456[source]▶
Pascal is probably the most sensible name, as far as traditional naming schemes go. Names after Blaise Pascal, mathematician and one of the two inventors of the mechanical calculator. Pretty fair association and tribute.

Git as a name is our daily reminder that pre-mainstream programmers were rebellious against the mainstream (to put it as generously as I could) before corporate interests took over. but i encourwge you to look up that story yourself.

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2. disgruntledphd2 ◴[12 Dec 25 12:53 UTC] No.46243665[source]▶
>Git

The stupid content tracker.

Still one of my favourite names.