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.

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.

> 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!)

<tangent>

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.

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.

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

I believe the phrase I'm looking for is hallelujah!

The naming culture is beyond salvation. It crossed the line when things went from 'We invented this word to name our thing.' to 'We fused the concept of breakfast muffins in cat pictures meme to the previous application of the open source tool to name our abstract thing more accurately. That's why it's called 7Mermaids.'

I remember when Yahoo had to spend a fortune on commercials asking "Do you Yahoo?!" It seems that old business lesson was completely forgotten.

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)

> 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)

the problem with technical software names is that they are either too long, too pointless, do not die when underlying tool goes through re-incarnation(looking at you angular) or worse, too important to be wasted on a lesser quality project (looking at you react-router).

in my company, we have a tool whose technical name was four word long, and has just as much cognitive load as any technical name.

one of my biggest contribution to that project was to Name it.i gave it a simple name, with zero relation to tech or any software

and suddenly our PMs, Managers, Users can pronounce it and can actually type it correctly and of course recall it's name flawlessly.

so, at least from my experience, having a small, easy to pronounce name is more important than having technical name.

Moreover having a name with all of the qualities is definitely desirable, but there are many projects in world and not that great names. and many Great names (looking at you, Vue.js) are either already taken or beyond my naming skills