Names should be cute, not descriptive

Re:Names should be cute, not descriptive by JackFr on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @10:11AM (#34325981)

You can have the worst of both worlds. I've worked at three(!) seperate companies which have had projects called 'Hydra' (and the number of people who were ignorant of what the Hydra was, and why it might not have been a great name for a software project never ceased to amaze me.)

I like clever, cute names. That is names like Hydra, Spirit, and others which are unrelated to the function, but which are anodyne and generic and not terribly uncommon end up being the worst.

(I have a soft spot for clever names, my favorite is still Leiningen the clojure build system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiningen_Versus_the_Ants)

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Re:Names should be cute, not descriptive by nivenkos on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @10:30AM (#34326293)

It feels like every company has an Apollo, Hydra or Hermes...

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Re:Names should be cute, not descriptive by mook on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @11:33AM (#34327410)

I worked at a startup with a bird theme for a bit under 4 years. There were three separate things named Nightingale in that time. By the time I left, it was kind of a joke to suggest that as the name for random things.

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Re:Names should be cute, not descriptive by mypalmike on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @12:01PM (#34327857)

Nightingale was probably also the name of a meeting room.

I managed to avoid creating any new tools or services with bird names during my time there, though it was tempting to do so.

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Re:Names should be cute, not descriptive by nix-zarathustra on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @07:19PM (#34333388)

Mozilla was named because the browser was going to be a "Mosaic killer". They made a bug tracker which they named bugzilla. Atlassian made their own bug tracker called Jira, in reference to the japanese transliteration for godzilla, "gojira", which is similar to bugzilla.

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