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Comment by momojo | Hacker News Reader

A light-weight anecdote:

Many many python image-processing libraries have an `imread()` function. I didn't know about this when designing our own bespoke image-lib at work, and went with an esoteric `image_get()` that I never bothered to refactor.

When I ask ChatGPT for help writing one-off scripts using the internal library I often forget to give it more context than just `import mylib` at the top, and it almost always defaults to `mylib.imread()`.

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I don't know if there's an earlier source, but I'm guessing Matlab originally popularized the `imread` name, and that OpenCV (along with its python wrapper) took it from there, same for scipy. Scikit-image then followed along, presumably.

As someone not familiar with these libraries, image_get or image_read seems much clearer to me than imread. I'm wondering if the convention is worse than your instinct in this case. Maybe these AI tools will push us towards conventions that aren't always the best design.

image_get is clearer—unless you've used Matlab, Octave, matplotlib, SciPy, OpenCV, scikit-learn, or other things that have copied Matlab's interface. In that case, using the established name is clearer.

(Unless, on the gripping hand, your image_get function is subtly different from Matlab's imread, for example by not returning an array, in which case a different name might be better.)

Plus one for the The Mote in God's Eye reference.

What do libjpeg and family use?

That's a perfect example! I wonder if changing it would be an improvement? If you can just replace image_get with imread in all the callers, maybe it would save your team mental effort and/or onboarding time in the future.

I strongly prefer `image_get/image_read` for clarity, but I would just stump in a method called `imread` which is functionally the same and hide it from the documentation.

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