Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

It is sad to see such a comment come from someone with such high karma and seniority. I hope that it is not reflective of the ethos of this community.

I feel we have way too little humanity in tech. With the advent of AI, that does not promise to improve.

Not to mention, we have a bunch of names that are just jokes, bad puns, random references, or idle wordplay.

C# is named because it’s a step up from C++, which is one better than C, which is the next thing after B.

Python is just an arbitrarily chosen name referencing a comedy troupe.

Linux is Linus’s copy of Minix, which is a minimal Unix, which is based off of Multics, which is a pseudo-initialism.

We have names honoring the dead; Pascal, Ada, Darwin.

We can name one color in one spec in honor of one person’s dead child.

It is neither a burden nor out of character for the field. If you genuinely believe it is a problem, I ask that you step back and reflect on why you truly believe it is.

Isn't "PHP" a play on words?

I'm told that it stands for "PHP Hypertext Processor." A recursive acronym.

Originally it was personal home page

It quite reminds me of Richard Stallman's reply on an email list asking people to refrain from posting about the birth of a baby on a technical mailing list.

http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...

This color is beautiful, the deleted comment was likely nasty, and Stallman was right.

Nuance;

I'm not sure it's fair for me to comment on "the ethos of this community," but I remember when rebeccapurple was added to the spec and there were commenters here bemoaning adding complexity to the spec for no benefit.

I'll say "You will find more than zero people here who don't really seem to consider humanity and tech overlapping domains."

It was not his proposal and it was not in his power to approve it. Community proposed and endorsed it.

He only requested a change from becca to rebecca.

It's the sort of emotions over logic we need more, you mean.

Not even this. There's no "logical" argument against it. The CSS color names are largely arbitrary and always have been (e.g. "indigo" is a shade of purple, when IRL indigo is the plant that produces the dye for blue jeans). Color names in general have been arbitrary since long before Newton coined ROYGBIV and decided to use "blue" to mean what we call "cyan" today.

It's an attitude that presumes that we can apply logic to all walks of life, which ironically is an inherently illogical stance.

Yeah, that's the main oversight of the OP that makes them look silly.

There was no logic to the naming scheme. It was all arbitrary, and the names came in waves from various sources like house paint colors, Crayolas, and the whims of people behind various implementations.

If they replaced '#663399' with 'rebeccapurple' maybe they'd have a point.

I mostly agree, but not for code lexical choices. The comment obviously lacks empathy and would be better unsung another tone and not words like graveyard.

Names are easier to learn and remember when universal. We know memorization works with associations and Chocolate, PaleTurquoise and Aqua are great for that. Chartreuse and DodgerBlue aren’t. While I can personnaly relate to the first the second is totally alien. Both lacks a bit more universality IMHO.

Absolute universality isn’t achievable but I stand that is a usefull direction to head to.

I’m deeply sorry for Eric’s daughter and gratefull for his work. I’m sure there’s other ways to honor them.

PS: thanks for the HN post, now I can relate to RebeccaPurple!

I’m not sure. I think it is what makes human. The details are that what make life worth living instead just the endless turning of the cogs. Besides, if you don’t like it, just use the rgb value.

I think finding a meaningful way recognise a significant contributor in a way that doesn’t really impact anyone is something to be encouraged. I imagine that most people would use the hex code anyway and only devs/designers would see the name in their tooling.

I can’t see how to apply logic to naming a colour. It’s fundamentally a perceptual and, dare I say it, emotional process.

I also think your comment is uncharitable and tone deaf.

Software is a part of human culture. All of human culture is intertwined.

You actually thought of that and then also wrote it down. You had to intentionally press "reply" to make the internet see this message.

I am stunned!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com