Hacker News Reader

Comment by deredede | Hacker News Reader

I love bland and uninspiring names. What's libcamera? A library for dealing with cameras, I'd wager. What's AXIOM? Not sure... My first guess would be a proof assistant.

It's also not just FOSS, Apple for instance has many ThingKits(HealthKit, UIKit) but also TextEdit.

View on HN

100% agree! Contrast with "Pokemon or Big Data" https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/

The same can be said about anything related to MLOps. The naming schemes are so out there but they all end up sounding similarly... generic. It's kind of weird really

I don’t, and here’s why: If libcamera turns out to be a bust, then we’ve burnt that name. Now the next library will have to be called something like libeyeopener, and I’ll have to spend years telling people “although libcamera sounds like the ‘official’ camera library, the one you actually want is libeyeopener.”

“Fanciful” names don’t squat on valuable namespace and allow different approaches to duke it out without one of them getting the advantage of sounding like the “official” one.

If the libs are called Barracuda and Seagull you'll have to spend years telling people "although you have heard of Barracuda, the lib you want to use now is Seagull", I don't see that as very different. People don't make library choices based on the name only, they search for what is recommended online and look at examples/features/etc.

I do concede that all else being equal people will gravitate towards the more "official" sounding library, but if all else's equal, it's not really an issue.

Even if that were to happen, it wouldn't be the first time the open source community had to find a name for something to differentiate it from previous efforts.

Choices like libname2, libname3, libname-ng and plenty of others have been used by projects before.

If anything the poor state of search on the internet is a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com