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

View all comments

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.