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Comment by redroo | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of Amdahl's 1967 paper was to dissuade customers that multiprocessors were cost-effective (read: more expensive for him to produce at Amdahl Corp). In a certain sense, he was correct. Ironically, however, that same paper is now the most quoted in the parallel processing literature. Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup.

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Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy strikes again.

Stigler's law - that is, the fact that eponyms often deny credit for an invention to many people who were relevant for it - is one of the reasons why I try to avoid eponymy where possible.

The other reason is that eponymy is often a symptom of laziness. Rather than finding a good, descriptive name for something, you end up with an eponym that is not at all evocative of the meaning behind it. For example, and without putting too much thought into it, Amdahl's law could have been called something like law of scaling or law of bottlenecks.

> The other reason is that eponymy is often a symptom of laziness. Rather than finding a good, descriptive name for something, you end up with an eponym that is not at all evocative of the meaning behind it.

The tongue-in-cheek flip side of this coin is that, when discovering something, one should give it a descriptive but complex name. That way, people are more likely to refer to it by the names of the discoverers than by the clumsy descriptive title the discoverers chose. :)

I completely agree with nhaehnle's law.

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