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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
In Dec 2022 I watched Richard Stallman’s talk on the EmacsConf, it was titled “What I’d like to see in Emacs”. One of the interesting points Mr. Stallman pointed out in this talk was “memorable names”, “I think every package that you […] should have a name that helps you remember what job it does. […] We’ve had a tendency to give packages names for the sake of pure wordplay or lack of obvious meaning”. That Stallman felt compelled to make this point in 2022 tells you everything about how far we’ve fallen, even within the Emacs ecosystem (known for its descriptive naming conventions, dired for directory editor, eshell for Emacs shell).
There’s an odd tendency in modern software development; we’ve collectively decided that naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.
I remembered Stallman’s comment lately when I had some difficulties following my friend who was describing some situation in their infrastructure. She was saying something like that: “We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue.”, perhaps only the last software in this statement was saying something about what the package/software actually does, I spent couple of moments trying to make sense of the names she mentioned, googled some of them, and really while I’m doing that I remembered that I never had to do this when interacting with any other fields: the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait. The Hoover Dam is a dam, named after the president who commissioned it, not “Project Thunderfall” or “AquaHold.” Steel I-beams are called I-beams because they’re shaped like the letter I. Even when engineers get creative, there’s logic: a butterfly valve actually looks like butterfly wings. You can tell how the name relates to what it actually defines, and how it can be memorable. If you wrote 100 CLIs, you will never counter with a cobra.
Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering, where people there maintain even stricter discipline. IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.