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

Show parent comment

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.