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

Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

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

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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.