On the front page at the moment are projects named:

Bear - minimal blogging platform - it's a play on bare

Venom - all terrain quadruped - snakes are all terrain?

Zoox - self-driving-car tech - half the other self-driving-car companies have nonsense names

Facebook - I still find this a smart name for the service

Looking Glass - 3D display - confused me for a second with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_server

Surfboard - audio feature extraction using ML - nonsense name

Plywood - cross-platform C++ framework - nonsense name, okay I sort of get it

I work in the steel fabrication / construction industry, so the material / construction technology related names catch my attention a lot and I wonder about them.

Naming things is hard. Naming things that didn't exist last week must be even harder!

Meanwhile in hardware we're sitting around with German-esque word trains like Multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC), successive-approximation to digital converter (SAR-ADC), parallel-multidimensional digital signal processing (mD-DSP).

It seems to be the software engineering world, out of all the engineering disciplines, that loves to draw upon fanciful names the most.

I used to troll an old housemate who was in web frontend by making up framework names. "Oh you're using Node.JS? Was talking to someone who's migrating to Polenta, with Shibboleth on the backend." He never did quite catch on.

The 4kW laser cutter I operate at my regular employment is aptly named by the manufacturer:

The Laser

You’d have to be pretty quick off the mark to respond with:

Shibboleth? Isn’t that still in private beta?

I realized after a while that any name I made up would invariably be an actual JS package, perhaps even a full fledged framework. Shibboleth is in fact v0.1.4, available via npm. https://www.npmjs.com/package/shibboleth

Baaaaahaha

0_____0‘s Law of Software Framework Names

> Venom - all terrain quadruped - snakes are all terrain?

More like a [venomous] spider than a snake I think.

Obvious now you point it out.

"Naming things is hard. Naming things that didn't exist last week must be even harder!"

Indeed, this is not something many people appreciate...

Salute!

Heh, I guess you’re right. I’m certainly no better at naming things. My recent personal projects seem to be named of fictional characters - I’m not sure why Ollie, from The Thick of It, reminded me of Python error handling, but that is now the name of a class that un-catches exceptions, so you can handle them yourself, like an anti-fuckitpy.

I think a lot of the SV/YC/"Startup" things deliberately choose nonsense names because it will make it "easier to pivot" when they decide that actually AI middleware for generating Hawaiian shirt patterns is a dead end and they should be making a cloud service for taco recipes instead.

Eh, I don't really care about 'edgy' but it bothers me that so many projects, especially when those projects are computer commands, are hard to search on. Like, ss or ip. I mean, in those cases, they're central enough to my world (I'm a sysadmin) that it's worth just memorizing to the point where I rarely need to look it up, but looking up an 'ip' command is way harder than looking up an 'ifconfig' command. Not everyone writes "Iproute" before pasting their 'ip' command.

I mean, I think it's less of a problem for projects that are not commands... really my whole complaint is that a lot of the commands in my universe used to be super unique; you aren't going to get a lot of off the wall results for lsof or ifconfig; but ss and ip? yeah, even when you limit it to my work context, you get conflicts on those.

I'm not the best at this Linux foo, but wouldn't aliasing certain commands that you need be helpful?

I mean if your going to go through the hassle of looking up that certain command, might as well make it easier on future you to alias that foo while you have it fresh in you mind.

This is where it’d be great to be able to limit the context of a search.

IP but not Intelectual Property

SS but not Secret Service

In DuckDuckGo:

    IP -"Intellectual property"

What works for me on the world’s most popular search engine is “linux” + name of command. YMMV.

Not to mention the acronym for all-terrain autonomous quadruped is pronounced 'attack'!