I'm thinking of getting out of the software business

D

drhowarddrfine

There is a GraphQL server called Hot Chocolate that can use a web socket client called Strawberry Shake. I often see other similarly named libraries and packages.

It's difficult to be serious anymore.
 
"Thing That Does Something" TTDS
"Another Thing That Does Something Else" ATTDSE
"Yet Another Thing That Does Yet Something Else" YATTDYSE

The problem is "cool", much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. How many engineers have been forced to sit through a presentation of the "brand new company logo and slogan that we paid marketing company lots for", that when revealed, you go
"We paid for that? What the heck is it? My 3 year old could do better".
 
I'm all for good old boring names. My tool for accessing a Unix socket from remote is called remusock (remote unix socket). Oh, well.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
There is a GraphQL server called Hot Chocolate that can use a web socket client called Strawberry Shake. I often see other similarly named libraries and packages.

It's difficult to be serious anymore.
Click to expand...
I remember Silverlight (from Microsoft). It was example of "bad" name. What means Silverlight and what is the real product...

But I think Silverlight and Hot Chocolate are better than Telegram. Because Telegram changes the meaning of popular word which has relation with its work. Abstract names are better even if they do not sound seriously. Imagine that Skype name is not Skype but Phone. You want to talk about phone as hardware and people think for the software - you need to specify every time.
 
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That's what I like about the BSDs and especially OpenBSD - they just name it by what it is. On OpenBSD the most crazy thing you may find is an "Open"-suffix to the name...
The HTTP daemon? httpd. SMTP? smtpd. SNMP? snmpd. BGP? bgpd. The tool to control it? bgpctl. Etc. pp...

Yes, it's boring - but boring is good if you just want/need something that just does it's job and is easy to find when things go bad and everyone is screaming. I absolutely hate it if some "boring" tool/service is named completely unrelated to what it does and you have to start a mid-sized forensic investigation to find it or find out what this thing does that is maxing out your CPU or eating your RAM. (especially if there is no same-titled manpage as with many "linux toy projects" that creep into other systems...)

From my observation over the last ~20 years (and nearly 15 of them making a living in this whole mess as a sysadmin), usually most of those silly-named "hip", "bleeding-edge" and "game-changing" software/tools/framework/whaterver disappear as fast as they came and get replaced with the next best thing that has an even more embarrassing name. So no need to use any of those - they are never here to stay. Just stay with the serious ones that are named (and documented!) properly.
 
I like pun like more and less or yacc and bison.
This is a tradition, private joke or/and computer science culture.
Today a cool name is from marketing staff. That let for me a taste of facility.
Names that are not related to existing tools or what the tool do is boring for me.

But there is still cool naming today. I like Bastille to manage jails in FreeBSD.
We, tech people, still have this sense of humor ! (Not me, but I have no doubt about you).
 
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sko said:
That's what I like about the BSDs and especially OpenBSD - they just name it by what it is. On OpenBSD the most crazy thing you may find is an "Open"-suffix to the name...
The HTTP daemon? httpd. SMTP? smtpd. SNMP? snmpd. BGP? bgpd. The tool to control it? bgpctl. Etc. pp...
Click to expand...
I don't agree. Products have to have their unique "personal" names, not descriptive. If a tool name is "Email client" or "IMAP client" - what will do other 50 competitors when the name is already reserved. And on the other hand what is the chance to find the site of "IMAP client" software if there are 100 times more pages which use it as type of software / noun.
 
6502 Those are product names for advertising, not technical. When you think of technical names for utilities on FreeBSD, Unix, etc., you see things like grep, dd, awk, etc. Nowadays you still see things that make sense like npm. I'm always suspicious of any utility with cutesy names like this when you're not selling something (and even if you are).
 
I have to admit there are some nice marketing names - e.g. "SPARC T1000" still sounds badass.

But especially for technical stuff I absolutely don't get it why more and more things have to be named like they put some 8 year old girl on a sugar rush in charge.


Still - for bare-bones bread-and-butter tools I just want clear, technical and descriptive names so I instantly know what they do. To a certain degree I'm OK with acronyms or puns on their (technical/functional) origins or function, like e.g. iocage/iocell for jail management or rEFInd which "finds EFI loaders". But if those names are too far fetched this can also become annoying very quickly, especially if every part of a software gets another ridiculous name - just look at the hadoop ecosystem for example: pig, sqoop, oozie, flume... why should this stuff be taken seriously if it all sounds like it belongs on a childrens toy computer?
A descriptive name also helps with remembering it when you only use it occasionally - I more than once tested some tool I really thought would make a nice addition to my toolset, but it had a purely fictional marketing-name that I forgot 2 days later and hence never used it again.
 
OK but what to say for poudriere? It sounds similar to (serious like) chocolate. When you mention 8 year old girl, I don't know what to say for FreeBSD logo. Is it for 50 year old professionals?
 
eternal_noob said:
poudrière is french for "time bomb".
Click to expand...
wasn't it more like powder keg?

Anyways - both are rather descriptive as I have WAY more builds blowing up when trying to use poudriere than just manually running "make" (or using portmaster) inside a build jail...

But yes, I also struggled to remember that name in the beginning... some other variant of "port<something>" would be better IMHO
 
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