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Comment by i_cannot_hack | Hacker News Reader

At first I agreed with you, but I think your analogy to algorithms actually somewhat counters your point.

The Wikipedia article for Dijkstra's algorithm gives an alternative name of "Shortest Path First", or "SPF algorithm", which I do think is a much better and more descriptive name.

It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully snappy and descriptive names. I think the world would be a sadder place if – instead of quicksort, mergesort, and heapsort – we had to struggle with opaque names like Hoare sort, Neumann sort, and Williams sort.

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The issue is that some concepts can't have descriptive names, unless you just explain the whole concept. For example. Lipschitz or Holder continuous function, or Riemanninan manifold... Whenever concepts can be described with a good name, those names tend to be used, but unfortunately a lot of times we just can't.

> It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully snappy and descriptive names.@@

Well, bubble, shell, insertion and merge, sure. Quick less so. And then there is Tim...

What? Shell sort isn't a descriptive name. The algorithm is named after Donald Shell, and has nothing to do with shells.

Huh. When I learned about it in high school 30+ years ago, I didn't learn any background on the name and saw an (admittedly, always awkwardly strained, and I can't even clearly explain it to myself now) metaphor in which the interleaved lists were somehow the shells. I never thought it as clear of a metaphor as by bubblesort, but more descriptive than quicksort.

kind of reminds me of the Heaviside function, which is a step function. When I first learned about it in school, I thought it was named after the "heavy side" on the right, as opposed to the "light side" on the left. Turns out that Oliver Heaviside was an actual person.

Nagle's Algorithm is named after a person. It helps make sure more data is sent together, rather than split across unnecessarily many packets.

I recently learned that in Polish, "nagle" can mean "all at once" - not pronounced the same, but still a cute coincidence!

You do know that Shell is a name, right?

quicksort kind of proves that the names don't have to be particularly meaningful, just somewhat descriptive and unique. It's not like mergesort isn't quick.

pivotsort would have been a better name

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