Posted by todsacerdoti 12/11/2025
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.
I actually stated this on the post, but let me reiterate, I think that naming things in somehow fun way is totally okay as long as it stays relevant to what the tool actually does (you can have this achieved by play wording suffixes (Mongo"DB", Open"SSL", Ma"git" are good examples, all are better than elephant, dog, and beaver).
Indeed. This helps me know that I'm using a database more modern than Ingres. I chose not to use Oracle or SQL Server because they might have predated Ingres.
Just one question: what's Ingres, and why do I care about it? Of course, I don't, which makes Postgres no more useful of a name than "fluffnutz" or "hooxup". That said, over time, I've come to like the name Postgres.
(At least that's how I remember it as I was "why name a language like that when you know it won't be searchable")
My point is that almost everyone refers to it as Postgres, because they do not actually value the descriptiveness of "PostgreSQL".
Also because the original name was, just, "Postgres". Stylized as POSTGRES.
PostgreSQL is an awful neologism (OK it's been around for a while now), and I honestly thought that they had decided to switch back to the original, and clearly superior, name. :) I recall it being under discussion several years back, and I am surprised it did not happen.
Namespacing, sure. But is "We use gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client to talk to the backend" (x50 similarly cumbersome names in any architecture discussion) really better than "We use Pegasus as our LLM streaming client"?
"Which one?! There are seven popular projects with this exact name on GitHub that have >100K stars; which particular one do you use?"
This is one of those classic examples where things you've already learned are "obvious and intuitive" and new things are "opaque and indistinct".
We can go back and forth with specific examples all day: cat, ls, grep, etc are all famously inscrutable, power shell tried to name everything with a self-documenting name and the results are impossible to memorize. "llm-stream" tells me absolutely nothing without context and if it had context, pegasus would be equally understandable.
How did they pass by "IngresSequel"?
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.
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.
But words help us learn. How many times do you notice a connection between some word from your childhood and an adult concept or place? And they're not random, people choose things because of many hidden reasons, but random is rarely the case.
Many of us love the story behind a word - as shown by many of the comments here reflecting on the cultural history behind our tool names.
I worked in finance – we gave our models names that endeared us to them. My favorite is a coworker naming his model "beefhammer".
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.