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Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by eternityforest on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:00AM (#32822337)
Aesthetically, at this point descriptive names almost look unprofessional, or at least quickly made. If you call your thing "ui-state-syncer" I'm going to suspect it's not really a big budget mainstream thing.

If it's called Vue, I'm going to think it's big enough that someone thought it was worth it to spend an hour thinking of names. It was intended to get big. This isn't some minimal internal thing for one specific use case that probably isn't mine. I'll be more likely to check it out.

They also limit the scope of a project. If you have a "datasender" people will say "This shouldn't preprocess data! This shouldn't compress! This shouldn't intelligently decide when to drop frames! It should just send!"

Now you gotta have a separate frame droppy preprocess thing, and the part that does communication has to tell it what kind of loss you have, but even that is not just sending data, so more likely you won't get that feature at all, or you'll have to go beyond the name.

If you hate features I guess it's a good way to make them hard to implement.

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by Tade0 on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:12AM (#32822421)
Seems that names for projects follow the same rule as troll names in the japanese light novel Overlord.

Short names, like "Gru" were reserved for the most powerful trolls because there were only so many combinations of three letters. Long names on the other hand were a sign of weakness and cowardice - bringing ridicule to those who introduced themselves like that.

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by HPsquared on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:44AM (#32822610)
Sed and awk kind of sound like high-level troll names.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by koolba on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @08:08AM (#32823248)
Both of which cower in fear when vi strolls by.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by Karellen on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @09:17AM (#32823865)
All fear the mighty `w`, `X`, and, most terrifying of all due to the uncertainty of their proper pronunciation, `[`!
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by koolba on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @02:25PM (#32828312)
But even he respects the one true troll :!
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by JosephGuerra on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @09:13AM (#32823817)
Bill, Bert, Tom, Sed and Awk. It kind of works.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by hulitu on Thursday September 15, 2022 @02:14PM (#32856156)
Awk, i underestand (Aho, We...) but sed ? Stream editor ?
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by smsm42 on Saturday September 17, 2022 @01:52AM (#32875114)
Yes.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by OrangeMonkey on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @07:10AM (#32822789)
I was literally - minutes ago - watching Overlord then saw this message just now. Small world sometimes. Rich world building that it can be referenced easily.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by Tade0 on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @07:25AM (#32822906)
I hesitated to mention it because of the stigma associated with weebetry, but I'm glad I did.

After all hackers were always - by and large - weebs, with their fascination with martial arts and Japanese culture.

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by bombcar on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @11:14AM (#32825384)
If you are going up against Gothmark, Destroyer of Worlds you might have a chance. But if everyone calls the big bad Dennis you’re pretty much doomed.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by davidkunz on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:52AM (#32822661)
An indicator of the dangers of C.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by adhesive_wombat on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @07:10AM (#32822788)
Back when a C functions and variables could only be 8 chars long[1], mid-to-high-level trolls lurk at every line.

[1]: or rather, if they were longer, the first 8 had to be unique.

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by e1g on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:21AM (#32822465)
As a counter example, there are plenty of successful projects/brands with highly descriptive names: TypeScript, RHEL, GitHub, AWS, GraphQL, HAproxy, Sendmail, QuickBooks, …
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by dagw on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:52AM (#32822660)
QuickBooks

I'm assuming this is a tool for quickly laying out and publishing books. Or perhaps a tool for quickly searching for and downloading books to my iPad or ebook reader.

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by e1g on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:55AM (#32822681)
In that domain (accounting), the name refers to “doing the books” which probably predates the abacus.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by smsm42 on Saturday September 17, 2022 @01:55AM (#32875124)
At least there's a meaning of word "book" that matches what it does. So once you learned what it does, you can make a mental note of "ah, those books". Imagine it was named FluffyTurtle instead. Good luck remembering what it does even if you already looked it up 20 times before. And not confusing it with SparklyCamel, which is an inventory manager for plumbers.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by Ensorceled on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @09:09AM (#32823771)
Yep, could also be those things.

But accounts and bookkeepers all know what QuickBooks is and are quite happy to not have to explain to their clients why they need to spend $75 a month on "KowalaBabyPooPoos" or something equally ludicrous name.

Which is the point which you probably didn't miss in the first place.

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by amadeuspagel on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @09:27AM (#32823982)
Apparently, there's an accounting software called Xero, they have the dotcom[1]. Pretty good name and domain IMO.

[1]: https://xero.com

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by Joker_vD on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:46AM (#32822627)
What is descriptive about "RHEL" or "AWS"?
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by e1g on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:53AM (#32822665)
I abbreviated on the phone, but the respective full names are “X Enterprise Linux” and “X Web Services” which are literal description of what their thing is. “RedHat” and “Amazon” are generic, but the product names are highly specific.

I mean it could’ve been “RedHat Cthulu” and “Amazon RainBox”.

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by ForHackernews on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @09:14AM (#32823831)
I strenuously dispute that "Web Services" is "highly specific".
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by marcosdumay on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @12:15PM (#32826304)
It is about as specific as the product.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by anonymoushn on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:49AM (#32822647)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon Web Services?
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by ForHackernews on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @07:16AM (#32822828)
"Amazon Web Services" could mean literally anything. It only seems obvious and descriptive because it's become a widely known brand.

Compare: "Nile Online Frameworks"

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by PurpleRamen on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @07:31AM (#32822942)
But, isn't AWS doing literally everything?

No simple name can describe the job 100% after a certain level of complexity anyway.

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by lupire on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @08:30AM (#32823427)
> Compare: "Nile Online Frameworks"

Those are synonyms. What is your point?

Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by smsm42 on Saturday September 17, 2022 @01:57AM (#32875134)
AWS was useful until it became to mean "about 9000 totally unrelated products, each of them having its own name, sometimes very non-descriptive". But at least you know it's a service from Amazon, sometimes you don't even get that from the name.
Re:Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic by munificent on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @04:09PM (#32829595)
> Aesthetically, at this point descriptive names almost look unprofessional, or at least quickly made.

I think part of this is that in software ecosystems that have been around a long time, the most obvious descriptive name for a package tends to have been chosen by the package that got there first but is now has an API riddled with outdated anti-patterns and whose code hasn't been touched in a decade because eventually everything becomes a breaking change.

The newer package has to pick a weird-but-available name, but has the luxury of rebooting with a cleaner, simpler API and an implementation free of "bugs" that must be kept around in the name of backwards compatibility.

Once you experience enough of those, you subconsciously develop an association that "boring obvious name" equals "crappy API and weird behavior" while "weird random name" signals "nice modern API and coherent semantics". Of course, it's not always true, but humans are voracious pattern matchers and will create an association at the slightest hint of correlation.