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Died from reading this (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] 61 points 2 years ago (12 children)

Never let programmers name things 😁

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  • [–] 36 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Naming things is hard, and everyone remembers these names, so they must have done something right.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yes, naming things one of the three hard computing problems left along with cache invalidation.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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