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Re:Fish shell by yewenjie on Monday May 17, 2021 @09:51AM (#27183385)
Re:Fish shell by PaulDavisThe1st on Monday May 17, 2021 @09:56AM (#27183424)
No. This is not RAS. It's a continuation of a long trend in *nix/FLOSS for using recursive acronyms. One of the earliest:

GNU: GNU's Not Unix

The one closest to me (though I didn't invent it): JACK - the JACK Audio Connection kit.

Re:Fish shell by mumblemumble on Monday May 17, 2021 @10:07AM (#27183566)
It is. See the difference:

GNU Operating System -> GNU's Not Unix Operating System

Fish Shell -> Friendly Interactive Shell Shell

One expands to include the original acronym, but doesn't duplicate the descriptive extra words. The other doesn't expand to include the original acronym, but does duplicate the descriptive extra word.

In other words, one is recursive but not redundant, the other is redundant but not recursive.

Re:Fish shell by trogdor3000 on Monday May 17, 2021 @11:34AM (#27184624)
What about bash shell? Bourne Again SHell shell. That's the same thing. But i think it can be a helpful distinction between using bash shell as an interactive shell and using the bash scripting language.
Re:Fish shell by mumblemumble on Monday May 17, 2021 @12:41PM (#27185421)
Yup. I'm one of those folks who thinks that RAS syndrome is an entertaining and occasionally useful language quirk, and not at all a problem.

For example, even within a computing context, saying "Fish shell" just might help someone understand that you're talking about the Unix shell and not the cipher, and would always help someone who's not familiar with Fish to at least understand that you're talking about an alternative Unix shell.

By contrast, whenever someone posts a Hacker News article about ML, the first comment is invariably someone complaining that they thought it would be about machine learning, and this is unnecessarily confusing, and a borderline injustice, it should change its name, etc. It would probably be easier for everyone involved if it were idiomatic to say "ML language", even thought doing so would be redundant.

Re:Fish shell by CRConrad on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @11:17AM (#27209885)
But ML preceded ML (at least as a somewhat widespread topic of discussion), so it's the machine learning fans who get to come up with alternative terminology.