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.
> 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.