I'm not sure if there's a term for it but it's like linguistic debris. The namespace is being polluted; eventually it won't be obvious what any particular word refers to.
AWS is probably the worst in this regard...so many services with names that give no indication about what the service actually does.
Meaning the long and awkward "descriptive" name becomes a lie over time. But the "code" name has no meaning, so it doesn't become wrong, you just need to maybe re-learn the meaning of the otherwise meaningless word.
See also: How do you descriptively describe the replacement/rewrite that does the exact same thing, but exists in some form while the other one does, also?
How often is it that you have a service that drastically differs in purpose from it's original intent? Can you give an example of how that comes about?
And usually not too long after I've coined a fun name for a project, I wind up feeling like it's cringy, and start to loathe when other people talk about it.
Also choosing names with non-obvious pronunciation is also a peeve, sometimes it can become a marker between those who know how to pronounce it and those who don't. For example Godot.
That's not a naming problem as much as it's a search engine problem. Search engines ignore anything that's not remotely alphabetic so for the longest time Google saw "C++ C#" as "C C". More and more characters are taken into account when searching these days, but it's still very error prone today.
If anything, C# was a mistake because it was developed after the first search engines entered the web. Then again, this was made by the same company that developed frameworks called "COM", "COM+" and ".NET". The names C and C++ were chosen way before this could have ever been perceived as a problem, because only lunatics and tinfoil hats could have predicted the internet in its current form all the way back in 1983.
In my experience, adding a revision (C99, C11, C17) to a search query often gets more relevant results specifically for C actual. For C++ the search term cpp always works for me. It's a bit of a pain to teach yourself to use, but after a while you start to get used to it.
Yes, and nerfed the + search operator in the process.
And some of the names are reused in Android even though they are in standard Java libraries.
It's probably invisible to people who have been using it all along, but for me, it's absurd and infuriating because almost nothing has a name that places it in a larger context.
Google seems to have a particular issue with naming things.
If you can't name something in a meaningful way, the next best thing is to name it something completely unique, and not just a generic synonym.
Alsoalso why do we need "factories" for abstract objects that relate to other abstract objects that are some sort of "thing"?
I have to wonder if some of this has to do with really smart people coming to work at Google, adding something without ever really grokking the whole mess, and then leaving after a couple of years because they got their tour of duty for their resume.
One can't be expected to get names right on the first draft.
Actually, one of the best named products I remember (for devs) was Big Worlds. It was an engine for making MMORPGs. I think the name had a clever mystique.
It's freeing to "break the rules" and code with single letter variable names, first letter that comes to mind. ;)
And yet Project Zero exists :-)
Googling your product will always be quite nice
It has always disturbed me that magician’s names of power in books are far too short: I presume there is more encoding than just the letters - the intonation perhaps contains a lot of entropy. Otherwise a name like Ged could be brute forced (or would that make a good short fantasy story?)
Edit: Related is the short story “The nine billion names of god” - the story is archived a bit incorrectly, it starts in middle of the page with no heading, with the line “This is a slightly unusual request”: https://archive.org/stream/ninebillionnames00clar/ninebillio...
The biggest tech companies on earth get their heads together and come up with those beautiful names. I mean, alphabet & meta are a thing...
You'd expect that the people who chose these "names" have dogs named "dog" and their childs have names like boy" or "girl" ...