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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Look, every single time this database is mentioned here, this exact comment comes up. Every. Time. For years, and years, and years. And yet, true to its name, the database and the team building it are still around.

At some point we've got to realize the CRDB team is comfortable with the name, it's not going to change, and all comments lambasting it are just farts in the wind.

I'm relatively ambivalent on the name issue specifically, but I do think this has been hashed over ad nauseum to the point of making for boring reading. This line from the HN guidelines:

> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

stands out as particularly relevant.

I think the idea is that after a nuclear war, the only two things left are your data and some cockroaches.

I scoffed at first, but I guess cockroach sounds to some what "maggot" sounds like to me.

Like the other person said, it's related to the survivability of cockroaches. One can hope for a management tier competent enough to evaluate an internal database on the merits.

Sometimes, I like to open The GIMP so I can take the logo for the Coq proof assistant, export it and commit it into the HEAD of my Git repository.

I think the weird names are fine, it's the management that needs fixing.

If not for git, you could have to commit to Subversion! And then back up the whole thing with Duplicity.

I'm not a fan of such sense of humor, and prefer neutral monikers like rsync, or Xfce, or Linux, but the ship has sailed.

It just gets normalized and the edginess erased with time and daily use. Imagine that somebody would suggest that you have to wash your hair with some "sham poo". They would be laughed out of the room, had not this word existed for centuries.

You name tools to your management? They won’t know what anything is anyway? The word database (some sort of Excel!) is usually an issue already. Why would you go into that much detail; just don’t?

Did Mongo get slagged in their early days because of the unflattering Blazing Saddles movie reference?

Call it whatever you want. Engineers should be able to select their tools on merit, not marketing.

Do you use Git? Does management know what it is?

Or imagine a name like that for a band or car for the masses? Gawfah and hurmph indeed.

Have you tried?

Really? is your management stupid?

Ha! Do you think this is uncommon? The path to becoming a manager in many organizations is biased towards those who are good at politics, loyal, a friend, and charismatic—all sorts of things that don't ensure effective approaches to technology selection.

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