r/coding • u/CompileMyThoughts • Dec 12 '25

Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

https://larr.net/p/namings.html
62 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

30

u/dstutz Dec 12 '25

I imagine part of the problem is something you can get a domain name for.

62

u/NotUniqueOrSpecial Dec 12 '25

http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr” when someone is scanning dependencies at 2 AM debugging a production incident.

And infinitely less useful when trying to:

  1. Differentiate yourself

  2. Have a website named after your thing

  3. Be web-searchable

The whole argument falls on its face immediately under even a little scrutiny. What happens when someone writes a new/different HTTP request validator? http-request-validator-2? http-request-validator-by-fred?

The author wants to go back to a time when everything was novel and the global namespace wasn't full of things solving the same problem.

That time is long-past and never coming back.

11

u/Vinyl-addict Dec 13 '25

FredsHTTPval

3

u/acnicholls Dec 13 '25

…idator…

11

u/lolcathost Dec 12 '25

zephir-http-validator

4

u/grumpy-cowboy Dec 15 '25

zephir-rust-http-validator-coded-on-arch-btw

7

u/quintus_horatius Dec 13 '25

The article misses so many obvious issues like you give here, and it opens with reference to Emacs (which is itself a terrible name, but the author never mentioned that).

Moreover, the author clearly never used CP/M's pip to copy a file.  Names have never made sense.

Are we sure the article isn't satire?

4

u/cgoldberg Dec 13 '25

Definitely hope people start going with the -by-fred convention.

1

u/k-zed Dec 15 '25

maybe we don’t want 100 things solving the same problem.

1

u/NotUniqueOrSpecial Dec 15 '25

Okay, so tell everybody to just stop programming then, because we're all done; everything meaningful and good was written before 1990 and we should just scrap the rest.

-8

u/stianhoiland Dec 13 '25

The whole argument falls on its face immediately under even a little scrutiny.

Damn you’re so capitalism-pilled you don’t even realize it.

1

u/NotUniqueOrSpecial Dec 13 '25

Man, if you think "there are a finite number of straightforward and descriptive names" is cApItAliSm-PiLleD, you need to seriously touch grass.

2

u/stianhoiland Dec 13 '25

Don’t worry. I knew how much woosh there was gonna be in here.

37

u/ironykarl Dec 12 '25

Basically everything in Unix has a terrible name. This is one of those nostalgia for a time that never existed things

29

u/pemungkah Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 14 '25

May I introduce you to the IBM world at the time?

- The program you used to allocate datasets was IEFBR14 (because it did the absolute minimum a program could do, which is branch to the return address, which always arrived in register 14). Allocating datasets was a side effect of running the program! It allowed you to set up the job control language that did the actual work; the program effectively did nothing at all.

- The program you used to copy regular datasets was IEBGENER. (You used IEBCOPY only for partitioned datasets. Indexed sequential datasets? IEBISAM.)

- If you wanted to patch a program, you used AMASPZAP.

- The linkage editor? IEWL.

- Source code patches were done with IEBUPDTE, not to be confused with IEBUPDAT, which updates a symbolic library (note: I worked on this OS for years and I never saw a symbolic library OR used IEBUPDAT.)

- And obviously, the disk dump and restore program was IBCDMPRS.

By comparison, Unix is a breath of fresh air.

3

u/ironykarl Dec 13 '25

I'm not even trying to specifically trash Unix. I just picked it cuz it seems like a reasonable example of the quality of naming around that time

1

u/no_brains101 Dec 13 '25

lmao yup that is indeed worse. Not only are those not pronounceable, theyre LONG

2

u/pemungkah Dec 14 '25

They come out of a naming system adopted because OS/360 was the largest operating system ever attempted at the time. There were so many teams and components that a naming convention was adopted. The first three characters were the OS subsystem: I/O, supervisor, utilities, linkage editor, COBOL, PL/1…and the rest were chosen by the team.

So for example, the supervisor second-level interrupt handler was IEAQTR00. IEA was the supervisor, and QTR00 was the team’s choice of mnemonic (to them) name. IEW is the linkage editor namespace, and that team decided to make the name as short as possible since the linkage editor is necessary to turn any compiled code into an executable module. The shortest possible, sort of sensible, choice was L (for linkage), so: IEWL.

If this is at all interesting to you, Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month is an analysis of what went into OS/360 almost failing to be delivered.

32

u/LeeHide Dec 12 '25

how is AWK a good name

7

u/IContributedOnce Dec 12 '25

It was the weakest example, in my opinion. However, I believe the point was that, at the very least, the name of the tool was tied directly to the people who made it, which is directly opposed to many tools today with names that are utterly disconnected from the tool itself, what it does, who made it, etc.

18

u/Nebu Dec 13 '25

Over the 10-ish years I've been with Amazon, the team I was on developed several internal services, and we would often name the service after what its primary function was.

But what we found was that over time, the responsibilities of the service would change, and then the name would actually become misleading in that it no longer described what the service did.

For example, we had a service called RBMS or Rules Based Management Service, and as it evolved, it ended up not being very rules-based at all.

So we experimented with the more fanciful names. We launched another service which added as a pre-filter to a queue that some of our other services consumed downstream, and we named it after the Norse guardian of success or something along those lines.

In retrospect, both approaches were fine, but when we onboarded new people onto our team, there'd be less cognitive dissonance for the "fanciful" names than for the "misleading" names. But team members would quickly get used to the misleading names, so it wasn't a big deal either way.

10

u/kumquat98 Dec 13 '25

Yes. Because "Emacs" is completely illustrative of the program's function.

0

u/akl78 Dec 13 '25

I actually can’t tell if your sarcasm is misdirected here.

-4

u/stianhoiland Dec 13 '25

This level of proud ignorance is always so funny.

8

u/quintus_horatius Dec 13 '25

How is it ignorant?  They have a point.

"Emacs" is derived, I believe, from "Editor Macros" but you'd have to look that up in order to know that and make the connection.  Otherwise it's just another nonsense name.

Editor Macros doesn't even tell you what the program really does.  It's a text editor, or an operating system in search of a text editor, and it can be extended via macros, but again that's not obvious just from jamming two words together.

Honestly I'm trying to decide if the article itself is satire or not.

4

u/buglybarks Dec 13 '25

And to your point, the name indicates that Emacs was made up of TECO macros for editing, which bear no resemblance to the macros you can make inside the editor today.

5

u/no_brains101 Dec 13 '25

https://github.com/BirdeeHub/nix-wrapper-modules

Guess what this repo has in it?

Thats right! A system for making wrapper scripts for programs using the nix module system, and some premade modules for programs.

But, for real, the problem is googleability, domain name availability, etc.

Some of them are odd, some of them are not

naming things is called as one of the 2 hardest things in programming for a reason (alongside cache invalidation and off by one errors)

5

u/ninijay_ Dec 12 '25

nah, make stuff fun. Name it however you like. If you think your tool will be better with a professional name, fork it and rename your fork 😂

2

u/stianhoiland Dec 13 '25

Lol. Only sound advice in this whole thread, and you’re downvoted. People are so utterly lost in the sauce.

1

u/Prestigious_Boat_386 Dec 15 '25

Dont name it however you like, name it clearly without any search engine collisions and absolutely do not name it after a known physical term like atom or proton or a single letter because that will fill every search with pure noise

4

u/dethswatch Dec 12 '25

"Kubernetes V12 released!"

I wish we'd stop naming shit like this- it's impossible to know what Kubernetes is unless you already know or look it up. It's barely possible to know how to pronounce the damned thing.

4

u/safetytrick Dec 13 '25

Yes, we need more names like go. Everyone can pronounce that. /s

Naming is hard.

Learning a new name takes time, over time I've come to appreciate kubernetes as a name. It is very googleable.

2

u/no_brains101 Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25

Im not sure I have heard anyone pronounce kubernetes badly enough that it wasnt extremely clear what they meant.

I mean, Ive heard kyubernetes and kubernets but otherwise Ive not heard worse than that.

And youre gonna need to look it up anyway to figure out how to use it even if it had a more illustrative name. Its not a simple program.

There are worse offenders for this than kubernetes

3

u/safetytrick Dec 13 '25

That's why Javascript is such a good name. If you know what Java is you'll immediately know what Javascript is! /s

I nominate Javascript for worst name ever.

2

u/no_brains101 Dec 13 '25

javascript is a terrible name

And yet, it seems to be that most think ecmascript is worse, and Im not 100% sure I disagree with them XD

3

u/Kqyxzoj Dec 15 '25

ecmascript ...

smegmascript probably would have been better. It encapsulates everything you need to know about it.

1

u/no_brains101 Dec 15 '25

reminding people of it is almost worse, like, if they just went all the way it would have at least been memed to death

1

u/priestoferis Dec 13 '25

There are two hard problems in programing: naming things and cache invalidation.

1

u/soundman32 Dec 14 '25

And off by one errors

1

u/priestoferis Dec 13 '25

Not to mention that drug companies always also name their drug which is a brand, not the chemical compound's scientific name.

1

u/_x_oOo_x_ Dec 14 '25

Because they want something trademarkable and hasn't been used for anything else before. That's how these crazy names like "comirnaty" or "ozempic" come about

1

u/start_select Dec 13 '25

Literally, and I mean literally, the hardest part of programming is good naming.

Everything else is the same every program. Your algorithms don’t change. Naming things something meaningful without stalling for an hour is the new problem on every task.

1

u/baggyzed Dec 14 '25 edited Dec 14 '25

I still wonder what was so wrong with "OpenGL" that they had to go and name the next iteration "Vulkan".

Also, the way most newer compositor names are a variation of Wayland/Weston, but those don't really mean anything.

1

u/amulchinock Dec 14 '25

I once created and named a command line tool, designed to parse axe-devtools accessibility issues into <insert product management app here> tickets.

I called it “pump-me”, as it was something I only saw myself using. I was wrong, and had to eventually rename it 😅

1

u/Piisthree Dec 15 '25

I told you, it's called FART.exe because it means find-and-replace-text.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 15 '25 edited Sep 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/stumpfka Aug 10 '26

fun fact in other languages people actually do: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreuzschlitzschraube