I'm pretty sure that this post inspired DL. It was written by Jay, one of the 3 founders of kafka (Jay, Jun, and Neha) and should be recommended reading for every software engineer if you've not read it:

https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...

An ordered append only datastructure is rightfully called a log. The fact that text based files are called logs is just an annoying feature in common english usage.