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Comment by ShaneOG | Hacker News Reader

It seems naming things is still one of the hard things in Comp Sci: http://rack.github.io

> It seems naming things is still one of the hard things in Comp Sci: http://rack.github.io

I think rack is a pretty good name for something that is meant to be the infrastructure for running services. Not sure of the etymology for this project, but to me it conveys images of a server rack in a datacenter.

I believe he referencing the fact that a well known technology called 'Rack' already exists.

It's not a bad name. The point is it's a name of a very well established, years old open source project used as the near-universal interface points between web servers and Ruby web frameworks.

Companies too... Rackspace comes to mind.

Rackspace also has a CLI tool called rack

Where do you draw the line? I find using the same term just barely acceptable right now. If ruby was as hot as it was three years ago, maybe I wouldn't. http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-rails-q-ruby.html?relative...

Wow three whole years ago? Pack it up ladies and gentlemen we're heading to the Ruby funeral. Sorry for the snark, but tens of thousands of developers are using the real Rack every day. It's a mature component in widely used web frameworks.

Next up a JavaScript framework called Rake because who uses Ruby anymore.

We picked Rack because we like the conceptual analogy. The naming conflict is unfortunate but there are a limited set of good words available. We hope that context will make the meaning clear.

Thank you for commenting :)

3 years is a life time in web dev.

More importantly, who cares? It was a common 4 letter word used to describe an item that holds stuff a hell of a long time before it was a Ruby thing.

Ruby programmers are a... dedicated bunch.

Those spikes are curious, so let's add a couple of other languages:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-rails-q-ruby-q-javascript-...

Seems like this is likely to reflect something other than changes in language popularity. Frankly the data doesn't seem very interesting without correcting for other factors such as total volume of jobs.

Overall, Ruby looks pretty much as popular today as 3 years ago to me from that data, though perhaps with Rails in a downwards trend (awesome - I love Ruby, but finding Ruby work that doesn't imply Rails is harder, and I don't like Rails).

But it's besides the point anyway. I simply explained why someone mentioned Rack, I don't particularly care either way (probably because I don't really care about Convox Rack - I'd never use a single vendor solution like this, and haven't exactly hidden how overpriced I find AWS in past comments).

It is also the name for physical pieces of metal in which you place servers to store them while they are online.

I don't see a problem with two items have the same name provided the functionality they provide is substantially different. Nobody is going to get confused over whether they are referring to the PaaS application or a Ruby library in everyday conversation.

That's exactly the etymology. We were thinking about datacenters and servers. The original name was convox/kernel, but we thought it wasn't very descriptive.

The naming collision with the Ruby interface is unfortunate, but we figured it was pretty easy to tell them apart from context.

Tbh I agree that as a descriptive name it works quite well.

However, it will muddy the waters for people trying to solve problems in future. For example, this tag on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/rack

A datacenter rack is indeed the etymology of the name.

Naming is hard.

"Convox" is the company and platform.

Rack is a project code name but it is a noun you come across when using the platform too. For example the 'convox rack update' command delivers API and infrastructure improvements.

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