The algorithm that named us Nelmio | Hacker News Reader

The algorithm that named us Nelmio

nelm.io

15 pointsSeldaek4 comments

Choosing a name is just about one of the hardest things of any new project. Sometimes you end up going with something, and it sticks - no way you're changing it halfway...

There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache coherency, and off-by-one errors.

"The words Mozilla, Google, Sony, and Atari pretty much mean nothing." Not true!

  Google => Googol, 10^100
  Atari => A situation in go where a chain of stones only has 1 liberty.
  Mozilla => Mosaic killer + Godzilla
  Sony => Conflation of sonus (the latin word for sound) and sonny (young boy).

That of course isn't to say that this excellent article is invalid, just that he happened to choose all companies who's names do in fact means something.

Fair enough, and interesting facts, but I think what he meant is more that they do not have a meaning to most people. It's not like concatenating real words, it's just finding a name that has meaning to you, but still sounds unique to the world at large.

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