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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

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This essay is not consistent. They ramble between company names Google ( which is a great name ) and tools like AWK which is not descriptive at all but a good name.

But I do share his pain with onboarding when I joined Humungous Entertainment the tools or systems were called Sputm, Phlegm, Mucus, SPIT. There might have been a Bile. :-)

1 hour agoby djmips

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.

15 hours agoby pdpi

> 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.

17 hours agoby plorkyeran

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

This article would certainly disagree with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def...

> the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait.

Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?".

> The Hoover Dam is a dam, named after the president who commissioned it, not “Project Thunderfall” or “AquaHold.”

It was actually called the "Boulder Canyon Project" while being built, referred to as "Hoover Dam" even though finished during the Roosevelt administration, officially called "Boulder Dam", and only later officially renamed to "Hoover Dam".

The fact that Herbert Hoover initiated the project tells you nothing meaningful about it. Would "Reitzlib" be a better name than "Requests"?

> If you wrote 100 CLIs, you will never counter with a cobra.

But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc.

> No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

When you open your medicine cabinet, do you look for a jar labeled "acetylsalicylic acid", "2-propylvaleric acid", or "N-acetyl-para-aminophenol"? Probably not.

It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.

18 hours agoby munificent

To be honest, `awk` that the author references to as a good name, is not. It's just the initials of authors, which does not convey anything about what the tool does. It's yet another cognitive tax.

And I would go further, the extremely shortened names in Linux and other places is problematic too, given that most terminals now allow name completion on tab.

1 hour agoby ndkap

I believe strongly in this counterargument:

https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam...

Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so projects will evolve such that they are not accurately descriptive after time.

(Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Service" simultaneously, and then have to rely on a lot of thick context to know what the distinctions are)

17 hours agoby kixiQu

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

The cognitive load is unavoidable and in some ways worse in industries with highly technical names.

At one point in my career I was an engine calibrator at a large automotive OEM. Our lexicon included physics industry terms (BMEP, BTDC, VVT, etc), a large software package where every variable, table, and function was an acronym (we had about 75k tunable parameters, each with an acronym), and all the internal company jargon and acronyms you'd expect in a large corporation. But every name was as technical and functional as the author would desire.

During my first month I was exhausted. I would doze off in afternoon meetings or pass out in my car as soon as I pulled in the driveway. I finally mentioned this to a more senior coworker and his insight was that my brain was working overtime because it was busy learning another language. He was entirely right! The constant mental load was a very real and tangible load. He relayed an anecdote when he went to S. America on his honeymoon and despite him and his wife having taken ~4 years of HS/college Spanish the mental work they had to do to function basically nixed half the daily activities they had planned due to exhaustion. That was what I was experiencing.

The idea that more technical and specific names reduces mental load does not track with my experience. The complexity is intrinsic not incidental and I don't think it has much to do with the specific names chosen.

16 hours agoby MerrimanInd

> “But memorable names help with marketing!”

> Sure, if you’re building a consumer product. Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product. The people who will ever care about it just want to know what it does.

——

It sounds like the author doesn’t view themselves as a consumer in this relationship, that they are immune to marketing, and that what they are advocating for isn’t just another marketing tactic. I’m not sure if any of those are true.

My experience with areas that use functional names to describe things is that you end up in a sea of acronyms (the functional-based names are a mouthful!) and you end in an arguably worse situation (did you say ABDC or ADBC, those are two completely different things).

19 hours agoby arscan

Sometimes I am baffled at what gets onto the frontpage at HN, reminding us all that the people who vote stories and the people who comment on them are less of an overlapping group than you might think. I can understand the desire to have names that are more descriptive, but to claim we have "lost the plot" while holding up names like "awk" is contradictory at best. It sounds more like this person just had a personal vendetta against cute sounding names, not against the names being uselessly non-descriptive. In my opinion, the way this post is framed at the outset is misleading.

— This comment brought to you via Firefox, which obviously from its name, is a web browser.

14 hours agoby jchw

>“Descriptive names are boring!”

>>Yes, and surgical instruments are boring.

I'm absolutely certain that this person has never been (awake) in a surgery suite because all of the tools people use have eponymous names.

There are a billion little grabbers that all have silly names like Adson, Allis, Babcock, Kocher etc. which are all meaningless until you just know what they are. And don't you grab the Mayo scissors when they ask for Metzenbaum. In med school we had a flashcard deck that just had a picture of the tool and what it is called on the other end.

In the end, I think the author has a point, but then doesn't really make it that well. I think using awk as a good example is a bit silly. diff is a good one though!

13 hours agoby dillydogg

> Our field deserves better than a zoo of random nouns masquerading as professional nomenclature. Clarity isn’t boring, it’s respect for your users’ time and cognitive resources.

I felt a little guilty at first, I maintain a project called Wimsey (it's a data testing library but you couldn't guess that) and at work my team regularly enjoys fun/silly names.

Trying to defend myself, I was thinking about various logical responses to this article: non-descriptive names don't become out of place when a projects goals drift; descriptive names will lead to repitition; etc.

If I'm honest though, I think I just like software to have a sense, even a tiny one, of enjoyment.

The software I use everyday, like Cron (named after a greek god of time); Python (named after a comedy act) and Zellij (names after a tiling craft) all have fun, joyful names that tell me someone loved and cared about these projects when they built them.

I need to learn these tools beyond just "x does y category of thing" anyway, so I don't mind learning these names. And it makes software engineering just a bit more fun than using "unix-scheduler", "object-oriented-scripting-lang" or "terminal-display-manager".

I love working in a field where people are passionate about their craft. Stern professionalism doesn't sound like something I want to trade that for.

It's a human trait to name the things we love, that's the exact reason why pets typically have names like "cookie" and not "brown-dog-2".

18 hours agoby benrutter

Ok man, now give me a moment, I need to administer my weightloss weekly injection of L-Histidyl-2-methylalanyl-L-alpha-glutamylglycyl-L-threonyl-L-phenylalanyl-L-threonyl-L-seryl-L-alpha-aspartyl-L-valyl-L-seryl-L-seryl-L-tyrosyl-L-leucyl-L-alpha-glutamylglycyl-L-glutaminyl-L-alanyl-L-alanyl-N6-(N-(17-carboxy-1-oxoheptadecyl)-L-gamma-glutamyl-2-(2-(2-aminoethoxy)ethoxy)acetyl-2-(2-(2-aminoethoxy)ethoxy)acetyl)-L-lysyl-L-alpha-glutamyl-L-phenylalanyl-L-isoleucyl-L-alanyl-L-tryptophyl-L-leucyl-L-valyl-L-arginylglycyl-L-arginylglycine

13 hours agoby elzbardico

> There’s an odd tendency in modern software development; we’ve collectively decided that naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

I'm charmed by the lack of truth in this beautiful sentence. Top of mind for me, at least.

20 hours agoby ctoth

I strongly disagree with this: calling your thing that serves webhooks “webhooks” or “webhook-service” sounds nice and neat when you’re looking in a repo list but you immediately impose a tax on everyone in the org: now everyone in a conversation has to distinguish between “webhooks” as the proper name of a particular service and “webhooks” as the name of a particular pattern. Multiply this by all the various components of a modern software ecosystem, and you turn your companies infrastructure into a private language piecemeal and, what’s worse, it’s a private languages outsiders and newcomers think they understand and so they often take much longer to discover what the actual services are.

7 hours agoby fiddlerwoaroof

>http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr”

Is it though? How are you going to differentiate between 10 different variations of http-request-validator repos on GitHub? I think both have their downsides, but making the name super generic sounding is arguably worse. What I don't like about names like zephyr is that they're purely marketing-driven; people end up picking a zephyr over a http-request-validator purely because the name is sounds "cool" to them, even though http-request-validator might actually be the better library. And don't even get me started on people naming their projects random Japanese words.. it's like the equivalent of nicknames that Thai people use, which are just random English words like Ice Cream or Thank You.

Maybe the happy medium is, like you said, names that contain a hint as to what they do, like Actix (actor model). But TBH you kind of still have to look it up to know what it does, there's no way you're just going to infer that. Maybe later on it helps you remember what it was for though.

13 hours agoby bgar

> "We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue".

But before those silly names came up, every company used their own three letter abbrevations for their tooling, which was not much better. They had descriptive names, but using the abbrevations only didn't help, and you needed a company wide dictionary. Like "We’re using CMT2 for configuration management, which feeds into CCM for the CLI, and then WSM handles our WebSocket connections, PM manages permissions, all through AJQ for our job queue."

8 hours agoby rurban

Nondescriptive names are not necessarily wrong or impeding. The author mentions science, yet STEM is filled with nondescriptive names: we have "Pythagorean theorem" instead of "right triangle sidelength theorem", "Newton's method" instead of "iterated tangent root-finding", "Lambda calculus" instead of "abstraction-application evaluation". Although they are not whimsical, these terms mean nothing to a first-time reader.

9 hours agoby MageOfTheEast

The problem with descriptive names is that they start descriptive but then become proper nouns. At a former employer in the Fortune 100 outside the software industry, everything started with a descriptive name, that then became an acronym. And as every project and tool inevitably developed its own idiosyncrasies, the descriptive name pretty soon didn't tell you anything useful about the project at all.

It is an unavoidable reality that knowing something's name gives you very, very little information about what that something is. That's what sentences are for.

20 hours agoby collinmcnulty

I had to discover this myself. when I first started working on personal projects on my PC, I'd give each of them some whimsical name, usually a pun or play on a quote from a tv show or song lyric. then in a few months time I'd come looking for the project and have to spend five minutes scrolling through a bunch of esoteric word formations and random half sentences trying to remember what whimsical mood I was in when I made the project. now I just name everything whatever I think I'm most likely to remember in 3 months. I do find it a little sad, losing some creativity and colour, so maybe one day I'll make a tag/shadow title system so I don't need directly descriptive names

10 hours agoby permo-w

If the community followed the author's guidance, we would have names like "Generic LLM wrapper 690" ("GLW690" if following the early programming language conventions.) or "Github clone with a different ideology 11"

20 hours agoby the__alchemist

I worked in finance – we gave our models names that endeared us to them. My favorite is a coworker naming his model "beefhammer".

12 hours agoby postalcoder

> programming shifted from corporate mainframe work to the community builders > which is good

but then:

> Our field deserves better than a zoo of random nouns masquerading as professional nomenclature

Okay? So is this professional nomenclature or the work of community builders?

I think: everyone should code, it should not be an elitist profession, we don't need to all accommodate busy professionals, i'm fine with corporate users having to say my stupid package name at work.

> Your fun has externalities. Every person who encounters your “fun” name pays a small tax. Across the industry, these taxes compound into significant waste

Someone please get this guy a bong rip.

19 hours agoby scoopdewoop

> IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

Well if they work for a drug company they will say “Let’s call this phlogistotheremone but sell it under the name Zyphyrax so that doctors and patients will refer to the same medication by different names.”

3 hours agoby JackFr

Its interesting how early programming languages are mentioned as having proper names. In the 60s we went from BCPL to B to C. B and C are not descriptive at all. Should they have been named "operating systems language" or "portable Unix language" instead? I also fail to see how AWK is a well named tool according to these metrics. The initials of the creators dont tell you anything about what it actually is or does.

15 hours agoby atiedebee

Yeah, this is a bit relative. Use microsoft tools/products (especially cloud/office) that came out in the past decade and you'll appreciate every other naming pattern.

My subjective view is that names should be exotic, flamboyant, unique and generally wild when it comes to tools. sticking your company's name as a prefix into everything (or the flagship product's) is confusing and only hurts you.

20 hours agoby notepad0x90

I'll die on the proverbial hill that the absolute worst instance of this has always been GIMP, which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.

It was and perhaps still is, a solid competitor to Photoshop, but any unfamiliar grownup is, quite reasonably, going to never ever ever trust anything to do serious work with a name like that.

14 hours agoby jrm4

A lot of the issue has to do with marketing. Some people name their tool for the pizazz it might generate and gain them fame or it's an actual company motivation. Instead of a hammer is a hammer and a heavy hammer should be named "heavy_hammer".

EDIT: I just noticed that the marketing angle is mentioned in the article.

3 hours agoby assimpleaspossi

> The next time you’re about to name your project after your favorite anime character, pause. Ask yourself: “Would a civil engineer name a bridge support system this way?” If the answer is no, choose a better name.

I'm creating a dotfiles to remote SSH session tool in shell. At first, I wanted to call it "sship", but that name was already taken. Something like "ssh-dotfiles-carrier" felt too long for a command, and abbreviating it to "sdc" would lose the meaning.

So yes, I eventually named it "shitt-p" (character of Hitman Reborn!), since I wanted it to relate to "sh"...

12 hours agoby sdovan1

That glorious day when I explained to my boss what wiki is and that we should have one internally, he fired "viki" into google, with smoothly honed muscle memory clicked first result..and got full screen of poon.

20 hours agoby rini17

"First we have to build a Bingo service. See, Bingo knows everyone's name-o..."

- 'Microservices' sketch by Krazam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

20 hours agoby notpachet

Great post and I think this extends to machine learning names, although not that severe. Maybe it all started with Adam. When I say “I used Adam for optimization” this means I used a random opaque thing for optimization. If I say “I used an ADAptive Moment estimation based optimizer” it becomes more transparent. Using human names or random nouns has been a trend. Lora, Sora, Dora, Bert, Bart, Robert, Roberta, Dall-e, Dino, Sam… With varying capitalization for each letter. Even the Transformer. What does it transform exactly? But it gets worse. Here is a list of architectures that may replace Transformers [0]: Linformer, Longformer, Reformer, Performer, Griffin, BigBird, Mamba, Jamba... What’s going on?

[0]https://huggingface.co/blog/ProCreations/transformers-are-ge...

5 hours agoby ozgung

I think if a project name is easily googleable, it's a good name. If I see "generic-tool-name failed" in the logs and can't immediately find what that thing even is, because I get lots of irrelevant search results, it's a bad name. This can happen with both descriptive and cutesy names.

13 hours agoby kgeist

I'm not sure arguing in favor of alphabet soup naming is any better. At least we ended up with semantic versioning, because originally it had also been just an expression of marketing and creativity. I don't understand even slightly why he blames Google in the article. He also forgot to propose what he believes Google should have been named. Search Engine? AWCSS? And the fact that he'd be fine with Viper and Cobra if they had backronyms points to the ridiculousness of the whole article. I'm genuinely most fascinated by how he accomplished writing that much text without the nonsense of his position dawning on him.

4 hours agoby iankp

If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?

20 hours agoby wpollock

I think the author is ignoring the difference between Branding and several other categories, like technical terms and their common names.

The adjustable wrench is named straightforwardly, but most English speakers know it as the monkey wrench. In some European languages its name translates to "French wrench" or "the French" (as in: French person), in others it's "English wrench" even though those two were originally just variants of the adjustable wrench.

Point is, all those goofy names are brands that may or may not stick around for longer and the terms for what they actually do are more descriptive.

My favourite example: BlueJeans. A videoconferencing platform. Why is it named like that? We might never know, but most likely partly to stand out, but there's a clear distinction between the brand name and the more descriptive terms used to tell what it does.

19 hours agoby Tade0

It's literally just as hard to name things descriptively as it is to name them cutely.

2 hours agoby rco8786

Worse is the Git UI, where random English words that seem to have a clear meaning in the context of source control don't do at all what you think they do, or five different things, or are really just a bunch of other commands wrapped together for less typing (like "pull").

I would rather have fantasy names than wrong names.

6 hours agoby dep_b

Unfortunately this article misses the worst failure of naming: name collisions.

16 hours agoby jollyllama

I really gotta hand it to "wget" for picking a good name for a program that gets things from the web.

8 hours agoby Dwedit

There was never a plot to follow; if there isn't a better name for an editor than "vi" (because "ed" is already taken) then maybe they should try getting rid of verbs too to give it more "refreshed" branding.

3 hours agoby officialchicken

Descriptive names are great until the thing you built starts evolving and doing more or less than the description and then is way more confusing that calling something somewhat general like my favorite of all time: 'Conformity Beaver'. The same goes for teams. Mythical creatures are good because they are fun and also allow the team to evolve its mandate and custodianship and may also help with Conways Law.

17 hours agoby jasondigitized

My favorite - "Tech without an interesting name (TWAIN)" for scanner/ imaging drivers from the 90s.

3 hours agoby runamuck

I noticed this with companies first, though at least it always made some sort of sense that a meaningless name would make it easier to pivot.

If your name is "The Database Company", but at some point find you'd rather do Blockchain and then later AI, the name might be an obstacle.

If you call yourself "Gworp" in the first place, you'll have no such problem.

(Though in not sure if "Mt Gox" aka "Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange" would be a positive or negative example for that)

5 hours agoby xg15

My old company Canva, was pretty good about this and I'm bringing that to the culture at my current place.

Krazam has excellently parodied this unserious naming indulgence of programmers[1]. "See, Bingo knows everyone's name-O. So we get the user ID from there." Racoon, Wingman, EKS (Entropy Chaos Service), RGS, Barbie Doll, Ringo-2.

1. https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ?si=QkI-TPStI9I4RtAB&t=33

19 hours agoby thundergolfer

Why is Go a very silly name and not Python, C, Rust, or literally any programming language name?

16 hours agoby tracerbulletx

A bit tangential but I was going to make a post of my own on naming with the problem of "filenames"

so many times I download something and the filename has nothing to do with the file or it's too much of an abbreviation so when I go to look for the file it's hard to find or if I come across one of these files I have no idea what it actually contains

9 hours agoby erelong

We should all copy from the Haskell community. Instead of coming up with a random name like "append" for a List function, we should appeal to our deep intuition of monoids and use the much more intuitive "<>".

8 hours agoby konne88

Yep. Just did a reimage update to Fedora 43, got errors about 'ptyxis' in some shell scripts. Wat (wipes desk and keyboard)?

Oh, it's the graphical terminal program (alternative to 'gnome-terminal'). Well, um, ok.

However, I will concede, after more digging as to why (as it rankled), that there was a "have to choose a unique name" issue there (even leaving aside trademark issues). I'm resigned (so I suppose signed up) to deal with residual issues that crop up going forward.

I love to mock '*ly.com' names for almost certainly doomed enterprises, but I get that at least it wasn't already taken.

15 hours agoby cranky908canuck

> Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering, where people there maintain even stricter discipline. IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

This so isn't important, but this just isn't true at least in chemistry. Plenty of molecules have names that aren't IUPAC based, but instead are based on prefixes/suffixes that are common to the field (more in pharmacological chemistry but not just!)

8 hours agoby girvo

The author should read up on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein or maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface both of which are actually scientifically important things.

Amiga famously had a custom ASIC called "Fat Gary" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_custom_chips

I really could go on about this. Names are only useful for distinct identification. They need to be distinct within their domain. Otherwise they're just an index into a list.

20 hours agoby TehCorwiz

Thete is no way to give descriptive names unless it is a single centralized system. Names need to be consistent, this is the main requirement for a good set of names. When the whole set is consistent, individual names can be nearly arbitrary, it won't matter much.

6 hours agoby Mikhail_Edoshin

I read an article linked on HN once (can't remember what it was) that recommended giving totally meaningless names to monoliths. The point being that one should not use the name as a crutch to decide what should or should not go in the service.

So at my last job, we called our monolith anubis. It always brought joy when someone asked for an explanation.

7 hours agoby liampulles

The article mentions that things were fine until around 2010 when developers collectively lost their minds. So what’s special about 2010?

It’s about that time that everything needed a website with a domain and all the domains were gobbled up by squatters. Also people were inventing new words looking for the fewest possible syllables for SEO and marketing.

14 hours agoby austin-cheney

We had this debate at my company and the end result was a ban on “random” service names.

So we ended up with “auth service” instead of something like “Galactus”. The problem of course is that “auth service” isn’t searchable in our monorepo and it was a nightmare to find or discuss any info or references to the service itself. Now imagine if docker was called “container manager”. Good luck googling that and disentangling it from all the search results.

The value of a name doesn’t come from it being self-explanatory but rather from it being a pseudo-unique identifier. The small cognitive tax of remembering it serves as a shared bookmark between people that you can refer to when discussing or speaking to others about it - whether we’re talking about docker, Linux, or another person.

7 hours agoby eckesicle

Forget about tools, in most part of the world, the name programmer and software developers like to call themselves namely software engineer is not even considered part of engineering professions.

That's why you find most of software engineering department in Computer Science Faculty or School, not in the Faculty of Engineering.

7 hours agoby teleforce

> http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr” when someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.

The "Zephyr" that I knew about was a notification system for workstation clusters on a LAN, written at the MIT Athena project. You'd announce something on it, and the info would spread through the network as if by a gentle breeze. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)

I do recall there was an experimental study in the 1980s (Hartwell, Landauer, and Gigliotti iirc) showing that this naming stuff doesn't matter. This exact same debate was going on back then. The study refuted Don Norman's "The Truth about Unix" paper which claimed that Unix commands ("rm", "mv", etc.) were too hard to remember.

15 hours agoby throwaway81523

Just name everything Phoenix.

(The joke here is: look up how many _major_ software projects have been named Phoenix at some point. It's a lot.)

16 hours agoby Arubis

I agree with the sentiment, though the argument could be made better. It’s not really about good names being descriptive, nor about memorable mnemonics. It’s that modern naming styles tend to overload random English words for no good reason, but just to be cute (which I don’t consider a good reason) or to be evocative of something which it isn’t. One issue with that is that you might have very different connotations evoked by the word, that clashes with the software. And conversely, if you have to use the software regularly, it now encroaches into the semantic space of what you otherwise associate with the word. I’d like my software, and hence its name, to be its own thing, thank you very much.

14 hours agoby layer8

The author is vastly overestimating the general legibility and familiarity of things they happen to know well and are used to.

Boring names are also very generic, by definition, and thus often harder to remember. Especially when there are 10 other similar tools. Is it sql-validator, sql-schema-validator, schema-validate, db-validator, or god knows what else?

Edit: I am in favor of better “sub titles” / descriptive slugs / and so on. As well as names that are a hybrid of creative and descriptive. Sqlalchemy is a good example.

Why isn’t there a command line utility called “whatisthis” with a standard protocol that allows tools to give a brief description of what they are?

It could be extended to package managers as well. E.g “pip whatisthis foo_baz”.

Shit we should create this…

16 hours agoby dwaltrip

I think there should be some kind of a tax or a fine for anyone who comes up or even suggests a new acronym. Regardless of the field. While I do agree with the article on some level, I still think even a randomly picked word from the dictionary is better than YAA (Yet Another Acronym).

8 hours agoby janmarsal

The cognitive tax is a real problem. Using random cutesy names, there is no obvious behavior boundary. Does authentication go in the SnufBux module? Or the Farfrumstable service? Who knows? Without obvious language clues to handle a new concept, any new functionality will get strewn across these internal boundaries. And why not - they have zero semantic meaning anyway! Sloppy names encourage sloppy programming.

11 hours agoby perrygeo

And forty years ago, I was using a tool called Brief, which was a product from UnderWare. I was also using a librarian named Marian.

19 hours agoby taylodl

Worst example: homebrew nomenclature

Typical docs sentence:

> What does “keg-only” mean? It means the formula is installed only into the Cellar and is not linked into the default prefix.

6 hours agoby nrhrjrjrjtntbt

That is one thing i like about the Julia package ecosystem. The general Registry (where package metadata is stored and where you go to register a new package), recommends using explicit names over short acronyms. For example, DifferentialEquations.jl is a package that does differential equations in julia (recognizable via the .jl suffix). What does Garlic.jl do? Exactly, garlic (the vegetable) modelling.

12 hours agoby longemen3000

RMS, of GNU's not Unix fame, has opinions on proper naming?

4 hours agoby pyrale

Past projects of mine.

    'pedes
    Glook
    Fitznik
    Plops
    Gyralight
    I wanted a new tower defence game: So I made one

Oh and https://lerc.itch.io/namesarehardpart5

The examples given for real world things The Golden Gate Bridge and The Hoover Dam, are instances of things. Things that the class of which they belong is old enough that Dam and Bridge are not new words.

If you are making new things you need a new name. Software is inherently new because computers have been in wide use for only a few decades. Instances of software rarely even get names, just numbers, with project names or nicknames attached. I'd be willing to bet both The Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover dam had project names or nicknames.

19 hours agoby Lerc

Why does nobody in SF say "I am going via the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge", but shortens it to just the "Bay Bridge"? This is the reason some bridges get a nice name (like Golden Gate), and some are strictly utilitarian (like SF-Oakland Bay).

And I am sure there are other "Bay Bridges" in the world too.

11 hours agoby necovek

Fun party game: Ask people if they know ChatGPT. When they inevitably say "yes", ask what GPT stands for.

6 hours agoby akie

Might as well just name it after the last name of the author. Like how physics has the Maxwell equations, we’d have the Torvalds Operating System.

7 hours agoby chaidhat

I like good old names like the foobar2000 audio player. Iconic.

- Starts with lowercase.

- Means nothing.

- Good player.

https://www.foobar2000.org/

2 hours agoby gaigalas

I believe one of the things that prompted stallman to give that talk was the inclusion of the lsp client "eglot" in emacs. Eglot i think is short for emacs polyglot.

The most idiomatic name, lsp-mode, was taken by another package. Stallman wanted to find another name but no one seemed to care as much as he did. I think one name he suggested in its place at one point was "code-parse" or something like that.

15 hours agoby dannyfreeman

What is it with a number of blogs recently that have turned off normal right-click behavior, and probably related, the scroll behavior is awful.

This is one, and as soon as I scroll on my work high powered Macbook and it's not smooth, I'm out.

19 hours agoby michaelcampbell

By this standard, ChatGPT is an excellent name: it's a generative pre-trained transformer that chats with you.

7 hours agoby qq66

are you guys naming your products?

We have an internal name and our product name. Internal names start as something that describes the project/repo/tool. Then within 18 months the name no longer makes sense so we rename it to some random name - state names, lake names, presidents, mountains, etc. It's just a placeholder.

The public facing product name is a compromise of marketing, trademark, and what gets approved by the CEO. Even the company name might change in startup world. No joke: the startup next door had to change their name because it was too masculine, and they realized more than half their projected market was women.

20 hours agoby fusslo

As they say in physics: color and charm may change, but up and down are forever.

19 hours agoby m3047

How do conference-room names fare in this view? My current company names them after football teams or local landmarks. But I heard about someone who used to work somewhere that named theirs after WWII battles, which was awkward for the Japanese guy they interviewed in one of them.

13 hours agoby mbg721

I agree, some names that come to mind are Celery and Windows. But there are always silly names. I like Plan 9, an OS named after an Ed Wood B movie. Its sibling, Inferno is full of puns and references to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Its corporate dullards who insist that neutral boring is appealing to most and I again agree but its not a hard rule for me.

16 hours agoby MisterTea

This drives me crazy because I use dmenu to launch things, and every time I want to launch a subsonic client I'm like "blueberry? Wayshin... Weish... Fei... FEISHIN!"

Just call it "subsonicfeishin" or something at least!

"Chatgpt... Mc... CODEX!"

It's nuts.

12 hours agoby komali2

I almost completely disagree with this post. The only thing I can consider that you should probably avoid embarrassing names.

A descriptive name is terrible if you're slightly off. Or if the library gets repurposed. Or if the project doesn't turn out how you expected but it's still helpful. With everything going on, a nonsense name forces people to learn about it instead of having them guess at it from a three word description that might be misleading.

The author probably never had a project where something got named the oscilloscope-controller but there's no oscilloscope in sight, but we used to have one and then we tweaked a few things and now it runs something else and but the name was everywhere.

And all of these are abstract concepts. Getting data from point A to point B. FIFO? It's an acronym. Pipe? Doesn't really suggest it can buffer data. Buffer? Queue? Both sound like they might slow down data. Precise technical names would be good, but then the chances the purpose changes goes up!

10 hours agoby salomon812

The two hardest things in software engineering: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

14 hours agoby irishcoffee

There are many different tools that attempt to solve the same problem, with varying levels of competency.

They can't all use the same name. If you want to build a better alternative to an existing solution, you need to choose a different name, this leads to names being arbitrary.

15 hours agoby WatchDog

Is fun not allowed anymore? In the past 3 days I've seen posts and comments on HN saying that:

- everything in interfaces should be useful, decorative icons are bad

- presentation slides should not use animations

- now fun name are forbidden too apparently

What the fuck?

> No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name

Do you want to enter the discussion on how physicists named quarks?

6 hours agoby thiht

Why does it have to be all or nothing? How about a clever name or two for marketing that stands out and doesn't get lost in a sentence "I'm not asking you to search, I'm asking you to use the search command" but not obnoxiously over done where everything is named after some Norse god or some other silliness.

19 hours agoby zcw100

I still think ICQ was the greatest application name ever.

6 hours agoby cstuder

I am highly sympathetic to this sentiment, but I think it's hard to name things in software because a) it's easy for the obvious names to get overloaded and b) many of the things we are dealing with are basically abstract relationships with arbitrary properties.

19 hours agoby lordleft

Love this:

> Name your library after what it does. Use compound terms. Embrace verbosity if necessary. http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr” when someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.

19 hours agoby chagaif

Even for consumer products - I'd rather have Mozilla Mail and Microsoft Mail instead of Outlook and Thunderbird. But marketing must market, dammit.

15 hours agoby Artoooooor

The Sonic Hedgehog gene would like a word.

8 hours agoby tokyovigilante

This reads like an extensive, and frankly exhausting, rationalisation of a personal preference. Personal preferences are fine, I have my own. But please stop thinking they apply universally.

Laravel works better than Rails-but-PHP. Ruby on Rails beats Opinionated-One-Person-Stack-Using-Ruby and I'm fine with the name Ruby as well.

I shall name my next product larmn in honour of OP.

17 hours agoby gherkinnn

I strongly agree with this. And what bothers me more than obscure or meaningless names like Viper are silly and embarrassing names like Hunchentoot. Names like that sometimes cause people to dismiss good software. It’s like using Comic Sans in a serious research paper.

One area of the sciences does partly use names like this, and that is biology. Biologists do sometimes name a species after a famous person, as in the louse Strigiphilus garylarsoni:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigiphilus_garylarsoni

19 hours agoby andrewl

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

19 hours agoby myk9001

I remember a trend of randomly dropping vowels started with flickr.

13 hours agoby hiccuphippo

I'm happy to see this post, it's something that bugs me every time I have to learn a new tool with a name that's neither A. unique to the project AND B. doesn't describe the project.

For example Zola and Hugo, static site generators - great, unique words that has no other meaning to me but the generator. The only other Hugo I know is a character in Bob's Burgers. But choosing random dictionary words like Avocado or Spice or whatever makes it completely transparent against my existing knowledge and now I have the mental lookup issue the author describes.

The other day a HN user was commenting "NAT, aka IP masquerading... (proceeds to keep re-using the term)". IME no one in the industry says "IP masquerading" unless your entire org and vendors are on Linux. Just call it NAT, we know what you mean. This a Linuxism and should be avoided!

Let's hit up Britannica.com on the word:

> a party at which people wear masks and often costumes

> a way of appearing or behaving that is not true or real

> to pretend to be someone or something else

I guess? I guess we are "pretending to be the peer IP when actually we are the LAN IP". But to me it's just nonsense. It's capital T Translating one IP to another for the sake of routing, drop the weird social implications.

14 hours agoby accrual

First it was racehorses. Then it was prescription medications. Then software.

I hope this goes no further.

17 hours agoby Beestie

The two hardest things to do in computer science is knowing when to invalidate cache and how to name things.

19 hours agoby davidfekke

I like to mock the current meta as being coca cola driven.

14 hours agoby 6r17

Idk about open source tools, but internal corporate things have codenames for good reasons.

20 hours agoby morshu9001

"...When you see “libsodium,” you must context-switch from problem-solving mode to detective mode: “What does this do? Let me check the README. Ah, it’s a crypto library... "

I would not mind the command names whose etymology was complex or inspired, if the README files would do a better job of giving context and function. Even though I have a wide set of wheelhouses in computer systems, I frequently encounter README files that still leaves me saying "Huh?". I shouldn't have to google three levels down before I get a clue.

11 hours agoby wa2flq

> Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product.

I'm not sure how the author came to this conclusion.

At any rate, programmers aren't any worse about this than mathematicians. Just replace [fictional name] with some foreign word or philosophical term that's justified with the most insane mental gymnastics you've ever heard of. Given some historical native speaker of Latin, do you think they're going to know what a matrix is for? No, because the word means "uterus". There is no connection to "tabular shorthand of linear transformations."

I think it's clear the author is writing this to vent frustration, but I think they've misidentified the actual problem:

> http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr” when someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.

My jaw hit the floor reading this. The idea there are people out there debugging codebases without knowing something as foundational as the dependencies is beyond absurd to me. That's insane and horrifying, overshadowing pretty much the entire blog post. Does anyone else live like this? How do you tolerate these conditions? Why would you tolerate these conditions?

19 hours agoby ux266478

>Every person who encounters your “fun” name pays a small tax. Across the industry, these taxes compound into significant waste

>Reserve the creative names for end-user products where branding matters. For infrastructure, tools, and libraries, choose clarity. Every time.

Ah yes the software I am giving away for free must go easy on the minds of the poor VCs and business drones who are extracting value from it.

19 hours agoby irusensei

Sometimes "branded" names are a good thing.

For example, naming some application modules strictly after what they do is super tedious, and uses words that are already reserved, therefore creating ambiguous nomenclature. Maybe I have various sort of permissions in my system but naming that particular permission system some greek god name creates a clear and shared meaning across the team (both business and technical), and mind you that that's what communication is all about - a shared meaning. Nothing else.

P.S. (I'm deliberately not going into discussion about bad things with that approach)

14 hours agoby soanvig

I find the remark that we give things names more as a word play than purpose.... kind of amusing? Like, of course people will find a way to play with the tools they have. And in programming, that is often words. Because what else would it be?

By far the worst aspect of the nerd ecosystem is the odd belief that pops up every so often that names should matter. In every ecosystem, there is usually some odd idea that it is only in their world that people abuse this.

Just skim through that list of things that are unexpectedly named after people. Sure, you can get upset about Shell's sort not having any relation to shells. Or Bloom's filter not having a phase where the data "blooms" into use. But you would have the same issue with French drains. Or how gaslighting has nothing to do with lighting things on fire using gas and the affect that will have.

Honestly, I think this would be a fun list to just keep going. Akin to the old Chuck Norris joke generators.

19 hours agoby taeric

I was just discussing this today funny enough. How long until someone goes for broke and just names their app "peepee poopoo"?

7 hours agoby homeonthemtn

> naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

Really? Have you specced a microprocessor lately? Seen what pharmaceuticals are called? How polymer compound materials get named?

20 hours agoby jameshart

Like GMail addresses, all the good names are taken.

20 hours agoby fph

> There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

> -- Phil Karlton

- https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/19836/has-phil-...

- https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html

13 hours agoby litbear2022

There is a place I agree with this: human anatomy. I find eileiter/oviduct superior to Fallopian tube.

15 hours agoby renewiltord

I have developed a language for writing structured queries. Based on this article, I have decided to call it SQL.

16 hours agoby lowbloodsugar

I could not disagree more. If you say "Ben told Mary that he would work with Scott on Jeff's house on Tuesday, but that Amy preferred Wednesday", that sentence carries a lot of meaning for the speaker and listener because those "names" have meaning to both parties. Nobody would tolerate the descriptive alternative: "General Contracting Company Owner told General Contracting Company Secretary that he would work with General Contracting Company Hired Hand #4 on Customer #22's house on Tuesday but Customer #22 Spouse preferred Wednesday".

2 hours agoby mkoubaa

Modern web developers: "Oh I just use Gulp, Jenkins, Babel, Yarn, Bower, Grunt, Slurp, Vite, and Rollup"

Me: slowly backs away in disgust

14 hours agoby wackget

This just feels like an old man yelling at clouds, trying to convince himself that the grass in greener in the other field.

> No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

This happens every day. In every scientific field there is a technical name and then the name everyone remembers. Nobody will understand if I speak about ENSG00000164690, but if I say it's the Sonic HedgeHog gene then it starts to make sense, because funny names are memorable.

> awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials)

I'd like to see anyone try to defend how using the creator's initials in a tool name describe its function. Unless you researched the tool's history, there is no way to know that.

Yet another "why the tools I use are the best and the tools you use suck", with a weird focus on naming instead of function.

5 hours agoby Rumengol

End of the day you know what it means or you don't. I agree it's helpful when a name is descriptive, but there's no helping the fact that you're going to have to learn the names of things that aren't obvious. Purely utilitarian names would constantly collide.

I also think they overestimate how distinct terminology is in other fields. Even their example of the I-beam is also known as an H beam or an RSJ depending on who you're talking to. I don't find it hard to imagine a mechanic referring to one of their specialty tools by the name of its manufacturer, either.

Regardless, the battle was lost before it started. There has never been good consistent descriptive naming as standard in computing; there was no plot to lose.

17 hours agoby queenkjuul

> We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue

Would it be better if it was this:

> We’re using ConfigurationManager for configuration management, which feeds into CLI for the CLI, and then WebSocketHandler handles our WebSocket connections, PermissionManager manages permissions, all through JobQueue for our job queue

I think the author makes the opposite point of intended)

9 hours agoby throwaway290

I hate when the steal sci fi concepts and I get falsely excited hearing about say Dyson sphere cold fusion drones.

14 hours agoby bilsbie

Is it just me or the website is completely unreadable? Black text on a dark-gray background

7 hours agoby denysvitali

>> Early programming languages followed similar logic: FORTRAN (Formula Translation), COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), SQL (Structured Query Language), I believe Lisp stands for list processing. The pattern was clear: names conveyed purpose or origin.

"names conveyed purpose or origin.": no they don't. If I use the authors example of the two people talking: as if saying "BASIC" instead of "Cobra" explained the meaning anything better to a person who never used BASIC.

I've been programming for 15 years+ and never used basic due to my age and I never know, until today, that BASIC stands for "Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code".

Why? Because I don't need to know and it doesn't make the usage of BASIC anything different.

20 hours agoby NotGMan

why is this stupid ai-generated text on hn?

7 hours agoby nathias

I have agreed with this for at least a decade. Name your things in a way related to what they do.

What does chef do? Garden? Pig? Burp?

Nonsense.

20 hours agoby alienbaby

I agree for internal names but disagree for public software/external names.

I disagree for public/open-source software, because: So many kinds of software actually have good names. Yes they use mythical names but with the similar function or relatedness.

Meanwhile, I agree for internal names, because: So many (legacy) code I worked with had terrible naming. This goes beyond only the names themselves but also their capitalization or consistency. I kid you not, in a $FAANG company I saw "SpidermanActivity" and "BatmanActivity" on a system that is used by Tier-1 services' on-calls.

> (Although this thing was not a Tier-1 service, it was not also completely Tier-2 either, as it was actively supporting operations of Tier-1 services, depending on the incident, a downtime could cause significant problems...)

Imagine you are trying to make sense of a large system, which has maybe tens of dependencies and as much of dependents, you are also trying to remember which API was Spiderman and how it related to the business at all...

More on the naming conventions, the horrible case of acronyms (which spans outside of software engineering) and PMs creating polls/surveys for "fun names for our new shiny thing that does X but we don't wanna call it that".

Going even lower-levels, engineers themselves are not careful. I had way too many CDK stacks named with not only varying dash vs underscore differences, but also with subtle "case-sensitivity" differences.

Each year, I am solving issues of Java devs' issues. Some of being "but it works on my machine" type of problems. And significant percentage of that is most developers use a Mac & macOS. Hence the filesystem is case-insensitive by default. But the deployment target & CI being a Linux, filesystem is case-sensitive. As you can see here, The camel-case combined with inattentiveness can simply cause many hours of waste.

> It's a plague.

Yes, there is an AI slop, but there is also human sloppiness too. I am quite happy with LLMs/GenAI that it is able to catch and capture these and less prone to make such sloppiness in the first place. (As it being a "predictive-text engine", next word suggestion is a clone of existing copy of historically occurring words)

At the same time, amount of "hallucinations" for various acronyms are staggering. Obviously I cannot expect otherwise. Even as a human, if I am missing the context, I would be either confused or plug-in something I already know...

16 hours agoby pvtmert

> The cognitive tax

> Every obscure name is a transaction cost levied on every developer who encounters it.

It’s not a mental burden, it’s a cognitive tax. Moreover it’s a transaction cost? Levied on people? Which loads their RAM?

Where’s the simple everyday English?

16 hours agoby keybored

C post increment

See sharp

16 hours agoby randomNumber7

I can't call my new formula translation language FORTRAN because it's been taken, as have many other names. So now to avoid collisions, it's named after my cat.

16 hours agoby ModernMech

counterpoints:

pascal, eiffel, ada, C, APL, dylan

19 hours agoby bighead1

Once again proving that there are two very hard problems in software engineering: Naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.

16 hours agoby GMoromisato

>There’s an odd tendency in modern software development; we’ve collectively decided that naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

Odd? Modern? I started working professionally in 2005 and everything had silly names. The DNS server was named athena instead of c302r5s1 or whatever building/room/rack/position name. I once rebooted a server that had an uptime of 12 years, so it had been running since 1993... it indeed had a silly name. Everything had silly names, usually types of things had a theme.

>Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering, where people there maintain even stricter discipline. IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

How about piranha? aqua regia? Up/Down/Strange/Charm quarks? Gluons? Like a third of the elements named after people or places.

Curium, Einsteinium, Fermium, Mendelevium, Nobelium, Lawrencium, Rutherfordium, Seaborgium, Bohrium, Meitnerium, Roentgenium, Copernicium, Flerovium, Oganesson -- I guess none of these people were named Steve, but you get the point

These tendencies are OLD and EVERYWHERE. IUPAC names are just a convenient way to serialize data.

19 hours agoby colechristensen

- VTL-O2

- Forth

- Grep

- CVS (I'm not an American but you can relate)

- Clang

Altough MS products can be as opaque if not more. And let's not talk about IBM...

20 hours agoby anthk

One issue with package naming is competition. One of the great things about OSS or software in general is people can take inspiration from other projects that do the same thing. Personally I've ran into deciding which casting library to use

- runtypes - https://github.com/runtypes/runtypes

- zod - https://zod.dev/

- ajv - https://ajv.js.org/

AJV and runtypes use the naming convention that the article suggestions. It's named is derived from how it's used. Zod on the other hand seems to come from left field.

Personally, I built a simple caster called "ShallowCaster" before choosing to move to a library as things got move complex but I think a problem is that as competition increases the "generic" naming becomes more difficult to find.

I suppose an option is to include the author name for each package such as "json casting from google" or "@google/json-casting" this way all packages can use the descriptive naming while not conflicting

20 hours agoby formula1

There is actually a good reason not mentioned, not to name tools by their purpose:

- the purpose will change

Your "silicon-valley-bank-integrator" tool will eventually need to be updated to do something else.

Or your "login-page-config-service" tool may eventually do more than just logins.

Using gibberish or mythological names gives a nice memorable name that doesn't lead (or mislead) you to believe it does a particular thing which may or may not be correct anymore.

20 hours agoby marifjeren

One more reason why Windows is superior to OS X.

17 hours agoby amelius

Irrelevant. LLMs know all the names. In 1 year they will be doing all the SSHing and terminaling.

Quickly: name the AVX2 instructions that the compiler emits for math calculations

17 hours agoby dist-epoch

Ummmmm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_compounds_wit...

"You sure 'bout dat? You sure 'bout dat?"

My favorite: there's a protein called "sonic hedgehog" that's essential to animal embryonic development. (All of the "hedgehog" family proteins would cause fruit flies to take on a spiky appearance when mutated, hence the name.) When chemists synthesized a drug that suppresses SHH protein's action, they named it "robotnikinin".

15 hours agoby bitwize

Preach! The worst excuse I hear is "but if we have a meaningless name it can't become inaccurate later when the project changes!".

Uhm yeah. That's like saying "if stab myself to death now I can't die of dementia in old age!"

Edit: look, it's here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237390

17 hours agoby IshKebab

Wait till you work in a corporate environment, where Project Fuzzy Mustard triggered a violation of the ElastoFish metric in the Yellow Hills subsystem, leading to a Code Mild Lavender with a side of Pink Sprinkles.

19 hours agoby groby_b

LMAO ok dude, don't like it? fork it and change the name. The author has a DEEP misunderstanding of the science of human language, not surprised he's a Chomskyite.

Rule of thumb, disregard every post that uses the phrase "context switching"

16 hours agoby casey2