- 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...

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.

> 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?

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

Genes and species are also sometimes given ridiculous names.

I still think ICQ was the greatest application name ever.

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

> 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.

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".

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.

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?