> 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.
In this example, you added "chopper", "patrol boat", and "handgun" to disambiguate them. There wouldn't have been enough context to do so otherwise, which IMHO is more aligned with the point the author was making.
If you were in the middle of a conversation about helicopters with people who knew lots of helicopter models, just saying "Cobra" would probably be fine. But in the software world, there are far too many obscure and new tools that are not at all clear without context. And the context just always happens to be all the dang things. A cutesy name could be any dang thing.
> It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.
I think you're just being selective because you disagree. A better example was:
> “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.”
If we want to cherry pick, your comment has:
> When you open your medicine cabinet
You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new. It's common usage and doesn't need to be disrupted by someone overly proud of a basic thing they made. You didn't call it Wapsooie, a "playful" take on WPSU (Wall-mounted pharmaceutical storage unit) or a MMC (Materia medica cabinet), or a whole host of other cutesy names or even acronyms that you might eventually get to if you were talking about medicine cabinets all day long, or designing or building them.
I mostly agree with the author. Software tools think they're so hilarious. I mean, the Virgil compiler is named "Aeneas" internally. Yet the cli command is "v3c"--Virgil III compiler.
My comment was mostly snarky, but I think the author is oblivious to their own biases and wrong. They even say:
> I read a lot into software history, and I can’t really say that there was an era of fantastic naming (even very experienced engineers made some very silly naming) but at least some current was trying to make some sense in the 80s; grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference).
"diff" is a good name. There is no sane argument that "awk" conveys anything meaningful about what the tool does. "grep" is utterly opaque until you know what it's an acronym for. The name itself conveys absolutely nothing. "cat" is actively misleading because it is a word, but the tool has nothing to do with felines at all.
The author only likes those names because they're familiar with them, not because they're good names.
> You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new.
Sure. That's because I only have one medicine cabinet.
If I go on homedepot.com and search for medicine cabinets, the bold text is "Glacier Bay", "Zenith", "Kohler", etc.
What's frustrating about this article is that the author doesn't even realize why software packages have these funny names. Let's say I want to make a JavaScript package for parsing command-line arguments. Seems like "argparse" is a pretty clear name for that. Taken. Maybe "cliparse"? Taken. "args", "cli", "options", "argparser", "cli_argparser". Yup, all taken.
Packages need unique names so that package managers and imports can refer to them unambiguously. You can namespace them with the author's name but that just makes it confusing to talk about when two people say "args" but don't realize that one of them is talking about "@some_rando/args" and the other is talking about "@weird_startup/args".
So people just pick cute names. The name is an identifier, not a descriptor.
There is no real problem here, the author is just being cranky.
In this example, you added "chopper", "patrol boat", and "handgun" to disambiguate them. There wouldn't have been enough context to do so otherwise, which IMHO is more aligned with the point the author was making.
If you were in the middle of a conversation about helicopters with people who knew lots of helicopter models, just saying "Cobra" would probably be fine. But in the software world, there are far too many obscure and new tools that are not at all clear without context. And the context just always happens to be all the dang things. A cutesy name could be any dang thing.
> It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.
I think you're just being selective because you disagree. A better example was:
> “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.”
If we want to cherry pick, your comment has:
> When you open your medicine cabinet
You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new. It's common usage and doesn't need to be disrupted by someone overly proud of a basic thing they made. You didn't call it Wapsooie, a "playful" take on WPSU (Wall-mounted pharmaceutical storage unit) or a MMC (Materia medica cabinet), or a whole host of other cutesy names or even acronyms that you might eventually get to if you were talking about medicine cabinets all day long, or designing or building them.
I mostly agree with the author. Software tools think they're so hilarious. I mean, the Virgil compiler is named "Aeneas" internally. Yet the cli command is "v3c"--Virgil III compiler.