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> Say you wanted to rename `fish` to `a-decent-shell`

You just made my argument. Renaming is hard precisely because you shipped with the wrong name. That's why you should get it right from the start.

Every cost you listed [distro packages, configs, scripts, docs, domain] exists whether you rename to something descriptive OR another random word. The migration pain is identical. "Fish" → "decent-shell" costs the same as "fish" → "zephyr." My argument was that this renaming won't be necessary if you started by picking up the proper name at the first place, and it's very unlikely to have the need to rename it. We shouldn't be optimizing to avoid renaming. That's trading a rare maintenance event for permanent cognitive overhead.





> Renaming is hard precisely because you shipped with the wrong name. That's why you should get it right from the start.

No, it's just because the goddamn string Id appears in way too many places and you can't sed-replace the entire world at once. It doesn't matter if the string was cute, fancy, or you found it to be a good name.


> We shouldn't be optimizing to avoid renaming.

> you should get it right from the start.

This is also optimizing for not renaming, just in a different way; also, you just said renaming was cheap, so which is it?




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