this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Never let programmers name things π
Web browsers: elinks, based on links, which I'm pretty sure was a play on words on lynx, which is a play on words on "links" on a web page.
Then there's email. There's mahogany and balsa and mulberry, which are in-jokes referring to pine, which was a joke referring to elm, which stood for ELectronic Mail. Pine has been forked to alpine, in an entirely different play on words.
Open Watcom supports a debugging format called DWARF, which I assumed was a ridiculous acronym, until I learned it only works on ELF binaries.
The big one is how there was a programming language called A Programming Language. There is a B programming language, but it's unrelated, being developed for Multics... Multics being the inspiration for Unix, a joke about castration. The developers of B went on to develop C. C was followed up by the command to increment a variable: C++. Except some interdisciplinary dorks thought it was a musical note and created C#. D is somehow a sequel to both of those.
There's a reason why-- look. Nicholas Metropolis, namesake of the raytracing method, was sick of mainframe computers with ridiculous acronyms like ENIAC, AVIDAC, and ILLIAC, so he named his university's new machine MANIAC. Absolutely no-one got the joke. All computer scientists are broken in the same peculiar way, and it is impossible to satirize how stupid we get when asked to name a thing.
Wonder if it runs on Alpine the Linux distro.
In other news, I never knew pine's genetic code still lives on; but I miss elm more. Can we do uw-imap too? Dovecot annoys me.
I've run alpine on alpine, it works just fine
Naming things is hard, and everyone remembers these names, so they must have done something right.
Yes, naming things one of the three hard computing problems left along with cache invalidation.
I feel bad that you've been left hanging there.
What's the third one? :)
Probably off-by-one errors
Also, this longevity should prove that product managers are useless.
Yea no kidding. Gnome is pronounced Guhnome, Mate DE is pronounced Matay, Open Suse is susuh not soos, and Qt is to be pronounced as "cute" instead of just... Q-T. Many such cases.
Wait for real? I donβt think Iβve heard many say those terms out loud, i pronounce them in my head Nome, Mate, Soos, and q-t
My favorite part of the AI boom is how all the stupid internal names become public. It moves so fast that there's no time to rebrand from the dork-ass things engineers come up with.