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Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

Why?

"Axolotl" at least has seriously pronunciation issues so I am glad it is not used "user-side".

For my part: because "Axolotl" is one of the most widely name-dropped terms in hipster cryptography, and because it's been adopted by other projects, and because it's distinctive, and because they basically own the term. In a stroke, everyone doing secure key ratchets would have been using their product.

It's also just a cool name.

Thanks and I agree about that!

I always liked "Axolotol" because axolotols are a type of salamander with the amazing ability to regenerate parts of their bodies (including their brains!), and the Axolotol protocol, like OTR, is "self-healing", meaning it's capable of recovering from a compromised session key (https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/).

And you're spelling it wrong which pretty much validates the renaming.

Axolotls are also cool because they're not really a species in their own right --- they're actually just the juvenile form of a salamander. But they can breed while in their juvenile form! It's as if tadpoles could lay eggs without having to turn into frogs first.

In fact, axolotls only metamorphose into salamanders if triggered by the external environment. If you don't stimulate them in the right way, they stay axolotls. For a long time they were thought of as two different types of creature completely.

There's a story of one of the very early researchers looking at his vivarium one day and discovering that it was now full of salamanders rather than the axolotls he was expecting. I would love to have heard the conversation...

Basically like a Pokemon.

I thought it was a misspelling of axlotl from dune, so I had to google it. Frank Herbert must have taken his inspiration from the salamander as well, given what the axlotl tanks were for.

Because words coming from Nahuatl are cool! (coyotl, mesquitl, tomatl, ahuacatl, etc.) See more from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_from_ind...

They’re distinctively spelled, don’t collide with existing search terms, often have available domains, etc. Most importantly, they anticipated the web 2.0 trend of ending words with two consonants in a row. ;)

Finally, just look at this guy: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/AxolotlB...

Linguistic tangent: the common suffix on those words is interesting. Is it required for Nahuatl nouns, like the Latin -t suffix? I notice that not all the other example words on the linked page-section have it, but a large majority do.

t͡ɬ is a phoneme in Nahuatl [0] (Voiceless alveolar lateral affricate [1] if you care to hear it), which explains why many Nahuatl words have sequences of "tl". I don't know if there's a specific reason why these words end with that sound (it doesn't have to be a suffix).

Edit: yes, it's a suffix (for Classical Nahuatl): "Non-possessed nouns take a suffix called the absolutive. This suffix takes the form -tl after vowels (ā-tl, "water") and -tli after consonants [...]" ([2]).

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuatl#Phonology

1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_aff...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Nahuatl_grammar

> Is it required for Nahuatl nouns, like the Latin -t suffix?

I don't understand what you're thinking of here? Here are some Latin nouns, all in nominative case:

    nauta   (first declension)
    puer    (second)
    gladius (second)
    malum   (second)
    lex     (third)
    limen   (third)
    tempus  (third)
    virtus  (third)
    civitas (third)
    cornu   (fourth)
    manus   (fourth)
    res     (fifth)

I gave the nominative case, but in fact none of those nouns has any form ending in -t. The only -t suffix I know of in Latin is for third-person singular verbs.

Ah, sorry, yes, I meant the verbs. Originally I was going to make a comparison to nouns—nouns in Lojban, which have a -j suffix.

I'm confused and am not sure if you're thinking of something else or if I'm quite misinformed about Lojban. I don't think lojban has suffixes at all (prefixes, on the other hand). For -j specifically, the only words in lojban which are permitted to end in j are names, but there it's not obligatory. Names are required to end in a consonant, but there are at least a few that are more common than j, I think.

FWIW `-j` is the plural suffix for all nouns and adjectives in Esperanto (not in accusative where the full generic form followed by an additional `-n`), but I don't know whether the OP had that in mind or something completely different.

> Because words coming from Nahuatl are cool! (coyotl, mesquitl, tomatl, ahuacatl, etc.)

> Most importantly, they anticipated the web 2.0 trend of ending words with two consonants in a row. ;)

But those words (coyote, mesquite, tomato, and avocado, unless I seriously miss my guess) all end in a vowel.

> But those words (coyote, mesquite, tomato, and avocado, unless I seriously miss my guess) all end in a vowel.

Because they were adopted by Spanish speakers. English products using these names could either adopt the Spanish form, or as the GP suggest follow the 2.0 trend and recover the original form, publishing their webpage in the East Timor .tl domain.

But it had a significantly better signal-to-noise (SCNR) ratio when looking for specifications, code and docs. The original "axolotl" term comes from a completely different domain, so it was easy to distinguish and filter for.

"Signal" in IT usually means UNIX inter-process communication.

Kids would love that name because they know it as that cool looking salamander with gills (or whatever they are).

Confirming this: my daughter was thrilled that there was something in my field actually called "axolotl".

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