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Comment by anyfactor | Hacker News Reader

People should really invest effort in creating unique names for their tools. Case in point a popular git gui client is called "fork". As in git fork named after the git command. Doing troubleshoot googles for that software is a frickin nightmare.

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Try living in the C# ecosystem and figuring out how to migrate from entity framework 6 on .NET 4.8 to entity framework core 3 without switching to .NET 6 or .NET core.

There’s only so many single-word .io, .app, and .ai domains left, and the trend to “tumblr”ize words has fallen out of fashion.

I like that a few video games are multi-words (e.g. Oxygen Not Included) and use a common abbreviation, (ONI) that is google-able - for instance "oni tutorial" is pretty good, or "oxygen not included tutorial" is a sure thing. Maybe more software needs to have more words in the name.

Maybe not a great example, as there is already a game called Oni, thus illustrating the original point of difficulty in finding original names.

Fashion or not, there's a clear advantage to tumblrize words to create names. The name is still recognizable with the association you're looking for, but the spelling is unique and easy to search for.

Almost as bad as the tool by google simply called 'repo', used to manage git repos... Imagine the confusions and difficulties of googling for troubleshooting.

Another case in point: postgrest - a clever play on postgres and rest.

Now try searching for any issue about it or even documentation about it in Google. All results are about postgres.

Even something as popular as rust the language has to compete against solutions to prevent the actual rusting and the game and the movie.

Sometimes I wish most software were given a uuid as a name. Life would be much easier.

That's a bad choice (like go), but you can't expect people to find a unique name. It's best to avoid frequent words, names of popular things, and names in the same domain, for your project's visibility, but the dictionary isn't big enough for all the projects in the world. Github alone has over 200 million repositories.

That should only be an issue if projects have to be named with a preexisting word. But that practice will basically always end up conflicting with the existing meaning of the world. IMO the best names are words which previously didn't exists at all.

Several years ago someone had a bright idea to name a game "N". And then someone decided to call a game console "switch" which made troubleshooting network problems (with this console) hilariously nightmarish.

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