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Comment by educar | Hacker News Reader

Had to look up the meaning of wangle. "obtain (something that is desired) by persuading others to comply or by manipulating events."

Does anyone know where facebook is coming up with all these words - folly/wangle?

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When I name things I look for a word that doesn't get drowned out by unrelated hits in search engines, and has some kind of link to what the library does. Straightforward names are great when they are obvious, easy to remember, and not a search disaster. Otherwise clever memorable names make a pretty good substitute.

I picked the name Wangle because it is a synonym to Finagle, and because I couldn't think of a simple self-descriptive name. I think I also had the Edward Lear poem in the back of my subconscious.

We don't have a central naming authority - people just name their projects whatever they want. Sometimes we have to or want to rename things for various reasons but it's mostly similar to the open source world.

"Folly" is a relatively common English word. "Wangle" is less common but I still see it from time to time.

What I find more interesting than the naming is FB's willingness to remove features from Folly as they are made redundant by Boost or std. I'm unaccustomed to such a lack of arrogance from a major player.

Doesn't removing features break backward compatibility?

My favorite C++ library is Qt; they never remove public API for that reason. In Qt world, we update regularly to get the bug fixes and other features. Last thing I want to do is port my code to some other new API to update the library.

If it's a feature that has made it into the std/Boost libraries, we'll be talking atomic utility functions which are being removed, in favour of calling the std/Boost ones. Not actual API-level features.

Folly is a common word, I think. As non-native English speaker I know the meaning of folly. But I saw wangle for the first time.

Yup, I know folly as well (non-native speaker as well). But it doesn't make sense to name a library 'folly' does it?

What I was wondering is if this some self-deprecating humor or these words are popular phrases from some popular book/meme/play.

I was going to correct you and say you meant "wrangle". Turns out they can have the same meaning! Wonder if there are other examples of two words being one letter off that mean the same thing.

"folly" is a play on Facebook Open-source LibrarY. I think using uncommon English words helps with searchability, although of course is not as good as made-up words or acronyms.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wangle

There are many meanings, including:

> A combination of the words wang + angle. > Noun: A curved/bent/crooked penis.

beats me i wonder the same thing all the time

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