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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

That's why I believe technical products should have better names. From HN you can see new products with very common names launched every month.

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I agree. I've recently become interested in the Gemini protocol, but between the space programme, the crypto exchange and various other uses of the word it's difficult to find related content without some extra Google-fu. It's exacerbated by the fact that most software written for the protocol tends to stick with the space theme.

I'm not sure if there's a term for it but it's like linguistic debris. The namespace is being polluted; eventually it won't be obvious what any particular word refers to.

Linguistic Kessler syndrome

I've learned to really loathe 'fun' names for projects (especially internal-only projects). it really just obscures whatever the project is intended to do.

AWS is probably the worst in this regard...so many services with names that give no indication about what the service actually does.

I can't pick a side on this. I agree with you in general but also it's nice to be reminded that there's a human and personal element to things sometimes. I normally name what ever I'm working on to be clear and boring though.

I understand the distaste for the stiffness of descriptive names...but I've found that over time trying to explain why a project has a clever name, or what it really does, to be quite arduous.

And usually not too long after I've coined a fun name for a project, I wind up feeling like it's cringy, and start to loathe when other people talk about it.

I have the opposite position. I feel that meaningless (especially if there can be a subtle fun part) names are the only valid thing for internal projects. I've worked on so many that A) are difficult to impossible to name "descriptively" and B) over time, shifted away from their original purpose.

Meaning the long and awkward "descriptive" name becomes a lie over time. But the "code" name has no meaning, so it doesn't become wrong, you just need to maybe re-learn the meaning of the otherwise meaningless word.

See also: How do you descriptively describe the replacement/rewrite that does the exact same thing, but exists in some form while the other one does, also?

Interesting. I don't experience much of what you're describing -- especially B.

How often is it that you have a service that drastically differs in purpose from it's original intent? Can you give an example of how that comes about?

Even something like "c" does not look like a good name anymore. For example searching for something C related often turns up hundreds of links for C++, C# many of them not relevant to the search topic.

Also choosing names with non-obvious pronunciation is also a peeve, sometimes it can become a marker between those who know how to pronounce it and those who don't. For example Godot.

Like the “Go” programming language. Only Google could have gotten away with this name since to be honest I was pretty sure it used to be a “do not brother indexing”/“stop word” back in the day. So I honestly suspect Google had to alter their search engine to search for the programming language they invented just because they made it impossible to search for because of how bad the name is.

C gets a pass because it is older than search engines, but Go was a pretty bad name.

They did alter it for google+, at least.

> They did alter it for google+, at least.

Yes, and nerfed the + search operator in the process.

When Go was new they recommended using "golang" for web searches. I still do though it sounds like it's unnecessary now.

there's also a non trivial amount of zealots that then complain when people refer to the language as "golang"...it's not correct, but hardly surprising either

At this point clang and rcran should as well change their official names. Golang has better possibilities on the horizon, but it wouldn't hurt either.

For me it seems like that the common workarounds (searching for "golang" "csharp" etc) make it not really a problem.

> Even something like "c" does not look like a good name anymore. For example searching for something C related often turns up hundreds of links for C++, C# many of them not relevant to the search topic.

That's not a naming problem as much as it's a search engine problem. Search engines ignore anything that's not remotely alphabetic so for the longest time Google saw "C++ C#" as "C C". More and more characters are taken into account when searching these days, but it's still very error prone today.

If anything, C# was a mistake because it was developed after the first search engines entered the web. Then again, this was made by the same company that developed frameworks called "COM", "COM+" and ".NET". The names C and C++ were chosen way before this could have ever been perceived as a problem, because only lunatics and tinfoil hats could have predicted the internet in its current form all the way back in 1983.

In my experience, adding a revision (C99, C11, C17) to a search query often gets more relevant results specifically for C actual. For C++ the search term cpp always works for me. It's a bit of a pain to teach yourself to use, but after a while you start to get used to it.

"c programming language" works fine.

I think this is actually getting better. A while back there was a trend of choosing the most generic name possible. For example, who though "node" would be a good name for a Javascript runtime? Or that "parse" would obviously be a mobile app backend framework? Yeesh. At least we didn't have a project named "Thing".

After years of only doing higher level scripting and SQL, I've been trying to learn to program Android recently, and it seems like there are dozens of classes that are all just synonyms for "Thing" or "Action".

And some of the names are reused in Android even though they are in standard Java libraries.

It's probably invisible to people who have been using it all along, but for me, it's absurd and infuriating because almost nothing has a name that places it in a larger context.

Google seems to have a particular issue with naming things.

If you can't name something in a meaningful way, the next best thing is to name it something completely unique, and not just a generic synonym.

Also, if you have created the 20th asynchronous task managing class, please put it in context with all the others - which are deprecated, which are good for what use case, etc.

Alsoalso why do we need "factories" for abstract objects that relate to other abstract objects that are some sort of "thing"?

I have to wonder if some of this has to do with really smart people coming to work at Google, adding something without ever really grokking the whole mess, and then leaving after a couple of years because they got their tour of duty for their resume.

Yeah. Cache invalidation and naming things.

Yes, of course, but (a) it's a joke, not a guide to best practices, and (b) to me, from a kind of Rip Van Winkle perspective, it's ironic because something like Android Studio makes refactoring so much easier.

One can't be expected to get names right on the first draft.

Every distributed system should be called hydra because it has multiple heads and recovers when one dies. Everything else should be called epiousios which is safe as no one knows what it means, or maybe some combination of words about dynamic entropy.

We should go back to using classical-sounding names: Virtua, imperia, rex, vita, Hercules. And sticking the letter X in there: reXX

Actually, one of the best named products I remember (for devs) was Big Worlds. It was an engine for making MMORPGs. I think the name had a clever mystique.

The real solution is to use GUIDs. One of the best games of 2029 will be Project 28AC8F07, the second in the B76A7CF0 series.

Naming is really hard. I concur with your satire tho in all honesty, these days, when I start a new project I name it "foo", "project", or "1" ("0" is too special), and then rename it something more apt if it actually goes somewhere.

It's freeing to "break the rules" and code with single letter variable names, first letter that comes to mind. ;)

> "0" is too special

And yet Project Zero exists :-)

Someday I'll have a code graduate past 'temp.py'

These names are too short. Think of all the collisions. Use a full UUID, e.g: {84347ab5-45e1-4801-98fc-685624039068}

Googling your product will always be quite nice

Also use a true randomness source to minimize the chance for collision.

You need to keep your project names secret, otherwise people will maliciously collide them on purpose.

It has always disturbed me that magician’s names of power in books are far too short: I presume there is more encoding than just the letters - the intonation perhaps contains a lot of entropy. Otherwise a name like Ged could be brute forced (or would that make a good short fantasy story?)

Edit: Related is the short story “The nine billion names of god” - the story is archived a bit incorrectly, it starts in middle of the page with no heading, with the line “This is a slightly unusual request”: https://archive.org/stream/ninebillionnames00clar/ninebillio...

I think that's the plot of "Unsong" (I never finished it though)

I was on mobile and was becoming fatigued trying to type random hex characters. It’s surprisingly time consuming, almost as much as thinking up an actual project name.

That's why new companies will spring up around NGAS, Name Generation As A Service. Full servers dedicated to finding the best names in the namespace and renting them for you, because who really wants to self-host a name those days, so exhausting.

It's the worst on iOS where you have to toggle between the alphabet and numeric layers. Some Android keyboards have the good sense to display numbers above the letters.

Trademarks exist to solve this problem but they’re typically too expensive for casual projects. What we need is some good sportsmanship amongst amateurs. It’s bad manners to name your thing using a word that is already taken.

People have also been complaining about this for many years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12201353#12204630

They've even been making slightly sarcastic browser games like "Pokémon or Big Data": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622752

Oh yeah. Try to find stuff about project matter. Out of luck? Well, thank god you can always search for thread.

The biggest tech companies on earth get their heads together and come up with those beautiful names. I mean, alphabet & meta are a thing...

I agree. Apple Mail, Apple Safari, Microsoft Windows, etc pp. Makes certain searches hard or almost impossible (until the arrival of the semantic web).

You'd expect that the people who chose these "names" have dogs named "dog" and their childs have names like boy" or "girl" ...

To be fair, Windows was named way before the WWW was a thing. And Apple Mail is an email client, so it absolutely makes sense.

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