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Comment by sprior | Hacker News Reader

Back when I was in high school and programming on the original IBM PCs I wrote a program that would graph "solids of rotation" (a function rotated around the X axis). Well I chose the obvious name based on the 8.3 filename limitations. One day someone looked over my shoulder and said "you named your program solid rot???" Oops.

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It gets worse. A very long time ago a was working for a startup that was doing real-time speech compression, for telephony applications, using a DSP, with the compression/decompression implemented in assembly language. The code had two processes, an analysis process and a synthesis process. My colleague named the entry point to the synthesis process synth_entry, and he named the entry point to the analysis process anal_entry. Either he honestly didn't realize, as he claimed, or he was better at keeping a straight face than anyone I ever met.

I think programmers get used to the idea that some names for things are never meant to be spoken and don't ever say them in their head to see what they'd sound like.

Reminds me of a variable name at my last job, fagg. Stood for like frequency aggregator or something..

Also, some people don’t have an “inner voice”. I don’t hear words when I read them. Sometimes I miss puns if I don’t go back and sound them out.

I heard about that recently, I can't imagine how that works.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I have a few “anal”s lying around in veritable names I’ve written over the years.

We have a lot of “analysis” in our application and I bet I have shortened them a few times, and in my head I would have pronounced it as uh-naa-l not realizing what it also looked like.

Exactly what I was thinking. I remember I once used "ana" everywhere in a program to avoid this.

I wrote a utility to analyze processes for a database system that liked to capitalize and abbreviate everything. To keep my naming conventions in the spirit of things, and because I was feeling a little spicy that day, I named the table that the utility wrote the analysis results into "PROC.ANAL"

Matlab and SciPy both have ‘cumtrapz’ for trapezoidal integration.

Although SciPy retains an alias for compatibility, the preferred name has changed: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/12924

Whats sort of funny about that to my mind is, the original authors were very likely innocent / oblivious in terms of alternative meanings and it's the (quote unquote) dirty minds of the PR/MR fix authors which make them a problem.

"I object to my own urban dictionary / reddit-based post-hoc interpretation of this abbrevation. It's offensive.".

Which is fine. We can fix all the things, and yes it's short term pain but not a big deal. What was said isn't the same as what is heard.

Where there are historically unfortunate names, we can deal with them just like all the other changes we make as a matter of course.

> *, 3/4 of the sample based integrated method names are, or are very close to, popular sexual-ish diminutives or slurs:

That's magical.

I was whiteboarding with a fellow (girl) student in college. We were sketching out a client/server architecture, and I abbreviated server as "srvr". When it came to the client, I thought I should also make it four letters, so I wrote "clit". I stood back and looked at it. After a couple seconds pause, it dawned on my brain that was probably a terrible shortening. I wordlessly erased my gaffe, and just wrote out the whole word.

So yeah, I can believe it happens by mistake at times.

"clnt" would've been consistent with "srvr", both vowel-less.

"If I had to do it over again, I'd spell 'clit' with an 'en'."

Be interesting to know how many people get that reference. I'd create a poll, but it's probably not worth it.

I didn't, but I am here to learn things: can someone please explain the reference?

TIA.

It's part of Un*x folklore, from Ken Thompson when asked what he might have done differently:

Xra Gubzcfba jnf bapr nfxrq jung ur jbhyq qb qvssreragyl vs ur jrer erqrfvtavat gur HAVK flfgrz. Uvf ercyl: "V'q fcryy perng jvgu na r."

Found here: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson

Thanks!

I once forgot that calling a solution "quick and dirty" is a raunchy double entendre until the lady I was demoing something to said "kinky". But your example is far more embarrassing.

That's what I said to a friend who has claimed that they "had some fun with LaTeX"

Everything is a raunchy double entendre, so don't worry about it. The lady was flirting with you.

I’ll take anal entry for $500 Trebek.

In a functional analysis class ("analisi funzionale" in Italian, shortened "anal fun") our professor suggested us to complete an exercise using one of the most relevant theorems in the field: the dominated convergence theorem ("convergenza dominata" in Italian, shortened "con dom").

The people who made Docker didn't account for the full range of British double entendres when it came to naming images. I can't remember what the second word was, but I'm pretty sure the first was something along the lines of "excited" and it appeared in a tech brown bag session when I was presenting.

Is/was "solid rot" slang for something somewhere?

Not sure. Assumed it was “poop” though.

In my head it was just part of solid and rotation which was exactly that the code did and all I ever thought of, but once the other person pointed it out it was like "oh, right".

Yes but what's the "dirty" meaning? What were they pointing out? It's not aparrent.

Seems so. I don't know what it is, but I'd rather not Google for it myself.

"rot" means "decayed/decomposed". It's got a negative connotation.

I was adding juice to a cockpit simulator game, a whole bunch of lerping and dampening of the position/rotation to react to user input. Didn't realise that I had abbreviated cockpitRotation -> cockRot until I submitted the pull request.

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