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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

It's "DigitalOcean" - sorry to be pedantic, it drives me absolutely nuts when people put a space between, especially publications.

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Allow me some pedantry as well : if people consistently make the same mistake with the name of a product, is the problem with people or the name ?

As lokedhs alluded, it clearly breaks established typographic rules.

I see you 'helped build' Digital Ocean, so I can understand your personal reasoning, but really - it's not at all important to anyone else.

Also, wasn't that a bit of a fad back in the late 90s early 00s? I know my wee business followed the path of concatenating words for brand ...something... , but I honestly couldn't care less how other people deploy it in their own space, as long as they remember the name.

Of course, some people might choose to reply "Oh I see you worked on DigitalOcean! Funny people care about something like that, but given another human does, I'll respect that!" Some might chose to reply "I can do whatever I want, I don't really care what you think" - people can choose how they react. It's always very interesting to me who choses what, it's very telling regarding personality. I am well aware people are welcome to do as they please, nevertheless, the name of the company is "DigitalOcean" not "Digital Ocean".

Reading my response back now, I didn't mean to sound cynical or abrasive when I quoted 'helped build' from your profile.

I could have as easily said "I see you were involved in.." or whatever and that would not have sounded snarky.

Honestly though, I didn't think it through that much, I just literally quoted what I saw. Just in case you thought that was where I was coming from!

</reddit>

The replies to my comment generally simply serve to remind me of the quality of humans in this community, I'm certainly not sure why I waste my time contributing to it.

My pet peeve is publications spelling NASA as Nasa. They've come up with some story to explain their decision that sounds just as bad as some of the lies Walter White told. I don't care how ubiquitous NASA maybe, it is and always will be an acronym. I accept removing the dots so it's not N.A.S.A., but I will only accept Nasa as a formal name if that's the name of a person.

How do you feel about "scuba" or "laser?" Acronyms that are pronounced like they're spelled (eg, Nasa, gif, taser) tend to end up being spelled like words sooner or later instead of being in all caps.

Personally, I don't write SCUBA or scuba, as it's just not part of my day to day conversation, but I would go with SCUBA. Also, it's never just laser or LASER, it's friggin LASER!!! Pew Pew!

It's a British/American English difference.

Oh, didn't realise. Sorry about that.

Ironically, I'm the same way with "PostgreSQL". There used to be _so_ many weird mis-spellings of it. eg "postGreSQL" seemed to be popular for some unknown reason

There is another point if view, and that is that corporate marketing should not take precedence over correct use of language.

Some languages tend to be more strict about this. I think it's particularly common to see English play fast and loose with the language compared to other languages.

In Sweden, for example you will see media write Iphone, because it's a name, and names are capitalised.

The same goes for Digital Ocean, or Digitalocean if you prefer. It can definitely be argued fairly that the writer does not have to break language conventions just because a company says they have to.

Exactly. Language is for all its users. I can insist that my name be rendered only in 14.5 pt Comic Sans colored with Pantone 19-3336 ("Sparkling Grape"). But people get to decide for themselves how they're going to speak and write. Corporate branding guidelines constrain only their employees and people who want to curry favor with them. Everybody else can do as they please.

Good point that everyone else can do as they please.

Moreover, this can be a big problem for the corps, and it is up to the Corp to protect their trademark and prevent everyone from doing quite as much as they please.

If people start using a trademark as a generic term too much, the trademark can be lost. There are legions of examples, starting with aspirin, escalator, dumpster, etc. [1]. So, they try to insist that it be used only the (TM) or as "Acme Brand widgets". It would not surprise me to see Google end with the same fate.

[1] Lexology: Death of a Trademark: Genericide. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5027217f-1db2...

> Corporate branding guidelines constrain only their employees and people who want to curry favor with them. Everybody else can do as they please

What a weird take on why you should spell a company name correctly.

Correct, nobody is going to put you in jail for misspelling Digital Ocean. You can do as you please. But everyone else is going to think you don't know what you're talking about if you can't even get their name correct.

Dang. Everybody else! That's a lot of people. You must have done a great deal of work to check with them all, so clearly I have to yield. I had no idea the entire rest of humanity was so passionate about corporate branding guidelines.

What a cringe reply. I'd love to introduce you to a new word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hyperbole

Oh no! Now an internet random thinks I'm cringe. Since we're criticizing other people's language choices today, I'll mention that everyone (absolutely everyone) thinks nobody older than 14 should use that word.

Seriously, bub, my problem isn't the hyperbole. It's that you're universalizing your personal preference as a way to try to dominate people. It might work on others, but you won't find an old software developer who minds being called "weird". We were all thought weird.

> I'll mention that everyone (absolutely everyone) thinks nobody older than 14 should use that word.

Now you get it! It's kinda awesome I got to teach you a rhetorical device and you picked up on it so quickly.

> It's that you're universalizing your personal preference as a way to try to dominate people

My comment was dominating to you? Damn, I'm sorry.

> It might work on others, but you won't find an old software developer who minds being called "weird". We were all thought weird.

What does you being socially awkward have to do with this? You still need to spell company names correctly, regardless of whatever behavioral issues you have.

”But everyone else is going to” *Citation needed

The media in Sweden use both by the looks of it. They do that for IKEA as well but it doesn't really make sense imo since it's an abbreviation of names. Both are made up language constraints anyway so I don't really see why the typographic rules of a language are more important than the equally artificial typographic rules of a company name.

You will definitely see both. You'll see things like Iphone being written by media sources that pride themselves on good writing, such as Dagens Nyheter.

If you go to https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikea the first sentence can be translated to English as: "Ikea Group, written by the company as IKEA Group, is a multi-national furniture company founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad"

Words such as TV started out in upper case because it's an acronym, but once it becomes a normal word, it's written in lower case.

They still write Iphone X, why not Iphone x? or Iphone 10? or Iphone tio? Roman numerals aren't really a part of the Swedish language after all. They write IOS or iOS, why not Ios? Is this not a normal enough word? It's just artificial rules replaced by a different set of artificial rules. Why not just use what everyone else uses, haha.

A bit of a meta discussion in a thread totally unrelated to this, sorry about that.

I think we're drifting away from the original point, which is about not letting corporate marketing departments decide how the written language should work. I used Swedish as an example of a language where this is a more firm rule than English, but Swedish is certainly not alone. It just happens to be the language I know best.

But, I do find the topic of Swedish writing standard to be interesting, so I'll be happy to do my best in responding to your questions, even though I'm not formally a linguist (although I was raised among them)

With regards to your question, I'd write Ios, because it's not an acronym and I do believe that I'm not alone in this. About the version number, I find at least one case of the use of Ios 10 at Svenska Dagbladet: https://www.svd.se/apple-har-atgardat-problem-med-ios-10/om/...

However, it seems to be highly inconsistent, and this is probably caused by these organisations saving money on proof readers.

> which is about not letting corporate marketing departments decide how the written language should work

Why do you keep repeating this? You say you were raised among linguists, but you're getting the most basic tenant of linguistics wrong. There is no such thing as "correct" language.

But more to the point, language allows you to write proper names as though they are registered or defined. It is not incorrect to spell it DigitalOcean, because that's the registered name.

If my name was JoeBob, you don't get to split up my name just because you think English requires it.

In English,

Also, Marty McFly is not Marty Mc Fly or McFly. Internal capital letters are OK.

Another point of view: DigitalOcean.com works but Digital Ocean.com does not.

You can actually flip that argument on its head - that maybe Digital Ocean was intended,but because a URL cannot contain a space, we ended up with a space-less version.

Red Hat is canonical (pun not intended) name but its website is redhat.com

> There is another point if view, and that is that corporate marketing should not take precedence over correct use of language.

There is no such thing as correct use of language. That being said, you should spell proper names as they are registered. It's iPhone, not Iphone.

> It can definitely be argued fairly that the writer does not have to break language conventions just because a company says they have to.

Language convention is to spell the name as the company as it is registered. You wouldn't change someone's last name because it didn't follow some other, slightly related convention...

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38827/how-to-wri...

I call it an iPad and an iPhone, not iPad and iPhone like Apple wants me to.

Thanks for this. I needed a chuckle.

Careful of the Streisand effect.

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