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Comment by AlexC04 | Hacker News Reader

I am really getting tired of programmer's "cute names for things". I recently went through training on adobe experience manager and literally every single internal technology was named for something that had no bearing on what it actually did. Felix, Sling, Jackrabbit ... I just did a quick google on the AEM tech stack and got the following choice quote which I feel perfectly illustrates the meaninglessness of Apache's naming "Apache Felix is to Apache Sling what Equinox is to Eclipse." what does any of that mean or do?!

I'd very much prefer if the named Guacamole the "Apache clientless remote desktop gateway"

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I think the idea behind meaningless names is that they don't constrain your project. This is good for codenames, but for some reason, today codenames turn into official names (maybe because of "release early, release often" philosophy?).

EDIT: My pet peeve, though, is names that mean something unrelated and much cooler. Like (my go-to example) Terraform - glorified configuration manager appropriating the name of something infinitely more interesting.

This is my pet peeve too. Speaking as a physicist, if I ever invent a Quantum Fusion Plasma Turbine Terraformer, I'm totally going to name it the Visual Java Rusty Lispy Scripter Plus Plus. I figure that might pollute the namespace for programmers enough to show them what they do to other fields. Revenge!

If you invent a Quantum Fusion Plasma Turbine Terraformer, I imagine people will be happy to let you name it whatever you want. Whether due to extreme gratitude, extreme terror, or both.

Unfortunately most of the IT industry is filled with so many bored people they hardly feel anything about the most outrageous over the top names or the software itself.

Perhaps we need something more interesting than naming peeves.

Terraform is a great name, though, because it describes, through metaphor, what it actually does.

This reminds me of a client that hired a new IT director and his first order of business was renaming all the machines from their boring names.

We had things like database servers named "db1" and "db2", load balancers were "haproxy1" and "haproxy2", web servers "web1" through "web8", that sort of thing.

The new IT director decided to name servers based on city names, where the country indicated the type (Sweden is database servers, Finland is load balancer, Japan is web servers). And these weren't obvious names, ISTR that one of the 20 names I had heard before.

So at 3am when an alert came in saying "Hagfors has high load", you had to know that was in Sweden to know it was one of the database servers. But was it the primary or the secondary?

It seemed a curious decision to make.

Back when Shell's design pattern required a master NFS server per work group whoever got the money to buy their server got to pick the naming convention. Since most of the servers where I worked were for geologists we ended up with servers named scungilli and murex and lots of really long names that required aliases. And unless you knew your biology classifications very well there was no reason to know which server went with which client.

That seems like a curious hire to make.

My recollection was that he wasn't with that company very long...

It really helps to have a Googleable name. You will get adopted faster and your community will grow if people are able to Google "enable 24 bit color Guacamole" rather than the generic alternative. Also generic language simply can't represent the sheer variety we have, or explain what projects do to newcomers who don't understand the generic language anyway.

Guacamole is way easier to remember than Apache Clientless Remote Desktop Gateway. Also while seeking help it's a lot less characters, so people wouldn't be annoyed by typing.

Disagree. Just because the name is longer doesn't mean it's harder to remember, because "Apache Clientless Remote Desktop Gateway" is much more descriptive.

Like GP, the trend over the last decade or so to use meaningless names for tech products is one of my biggest annoyances. Occasionally something gains such enough popularity that it doesn't matter ("Google") but in most cases these names are only meaningful to the people who work with these products every day and for everone else it's alphabet soup.

TIL - They almost named it "BackRub" because it "analyzed the web's 'back links'". Naming stuff is hard right? I remember thinking the name "Google" was a little silly at first but probably because I didn't know wtf a googol was (so didn't make that connection). Instead the first thing that came to my mind was a drooling baby trying to speak. "Apache" is another example of a seemingly meaningless/arbitrary name until u look into it further. So I would agree that "Google" is in the alphabet soup realm, but for some reason I'm cool with it. I'd argue its a few steps above the shameless "Guacamole" type names that have no soul.

No one would call it that, though. It would always be Apache CRDG.

Apache WebRD.

That's easy to say and descriptive enough.

That. CRDG. Sigh. And I'd be the guy going - What the F is CRDG and why am I supposed to install it? Guacamole is no better but at least I get to enjoy a moment a pleasure thinking about dip before I need to a) Google around trying to figure out what the damn thing is and b) set it up.

But wait! I haven’t told you about Apache Chips yet. The corn release is going to be crispy...

It would be abbreviated and people would be googling for the abbreviation I think.

Yeah, especially as "guacamole" memory-fails to "salsa," "avocado" etc. while "Apache Clientless Remote Desktop Gateway" memory-fails to "Apache RDP gateway" or something more similarly descriptive

Did you forget the /s ? My eyes must be deceiving me.

When I hear Apache Guacamole, I'm thinking of Native American / Mexican fusion food.

It could also be intended to conjuring up imagery of yourself relaxing on an island in the Caribbean drinking a margarita, eating chips and Guacamole. A gateway to a clientless, remote, desktop getaway.

Or, worse yet, what it’d turn into.... Apache CRDG

So how about "Apache Clientless"? The name doesn't have to describe the entire functionality of the product, but it's nice for it to have some relevant signifier you can mentally associate with something.

That would be an amazing name. Tells me exactly what it does, and the acronym "CRDG" is short, and both the name and the acronym would be Googleable.

Microsoft does this with their products like SQL Server. Which is confusing and can cause name collisions . Due to their dominance it’s not hard to search for but smaller products would have that problem .

Depending on what you're googling for, it usually provides enough context to know the phrase means the MS server.

Plus, even in colloquial language, we don't ever call a database server an SQL server. They're referred to as databases, or by their names.

In the absence of Microsoft's product, 'SQL server' may very well have become a generic term for an RDBMS instance. We cannot know.

That may be the case for other products, but in this case, they acquired the "Sybase SQL Server" product and simply renamed it "Microsoft SQL Server".

From a purely legal and promotional standpoint, Guacamole is more likely to be trademarkable than "Apache Clientless Remote Desktop Gateway".

I prefer descriptive names too.

> I'd very much prefer if the named Guacamole the "Apache clientless remote desktop gateway"

I don't like either one. "clientless remote desktop gateway" is way too long and cumbersome. But it seems like, recognizing that, the answer was $(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words), resulting in a generic commonplace word with no relationship to the project at all.

There's a reason why naming is called out as one of only two truly difficult problems in programming. (The others being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.)

A reason which you appear to have forgotten to include in your post.

Um... because it's really hard? Did that need to be spelled out?

Yep, the thread is about naming. Without saying why it is hard, we're just trotting out tired clichés.

Well, I have no real idea why it's hard, but I know that it is. Saying you're getting really tired of bad names is like saying you're getting really tired of software that has bugs. Sure, it's annoying, it should be fixed, but it affects everything and it's hard.

The conference rooms in my office are named for local cities and towns, many of which are nearby. We have a conference room named for the city that our office is in. In my foolish engineer mind, "we're meeting in Northeast 2-A" would make more sense than "we're meeting in Whoville."

And all the printers have names of cartoon characters.

Thank goodness we have a searchable indoor map.

Well this seems one of the million open source Java project from Apache. At one point names were straightforward like 'commons-cli', 'commons-httpclient', 'stringutils' etc and libraries useful for large number of programmers. But nowadays it is mostly half-assed 'frameworks' with fancy name.

It's not as if Amazon way of naming things is any better even if they use buzzwords instead of cute words : https://imgur.com/k013j1R

It's a product/marketing thing. "Apache clientless remote desktop gateway" sounds nowhere near as interesting as "Apache Guacamole".

Well, yeah. But that's just another name for clickbait, which people generally agree is a bad thing.

No it isn't, clickbait is promising one thing and delivering another, or needlessly hyping up a mundane story. Unless you thought Apache was literally selling guacamole, or the word guacamole makes you unreasonably excited, this is not clickbait.

I hate marketing as much as anyone, but even I can understand that brands sometimes have value. Google would have done much worse as a company if they'd just named themselves "Search Box".

I get your point, but I believe the name Guacamole existed before the Apache incubation.

For Sling the explanation is right on the front page :-)

A device for serving content very fast.

Why does this have to be the top comment? HN is so disappointing sometimes.

Let a thousand 'Markup Language's bloom.

Or they could just do s/Apache/Holy/

Just wait, when the only technology will be Clientless Serverless Stateless Dataless Interfaceless Codeless Gateway, it'll be called Cornucopia.

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