It took me an embarrassingly long time to internalize what the reverse proxy is. My brain got stuck on the fact that it is just proxying requests. What's so reverse about this? Silly.
It's one of the classic cases of a thing being named relative to what came before it, rather than being named on its own merit. This makes sense to people working at the time the new thing is introduced, but is confusing to every other learner in the future.
Could be worse. All the many things named after people prevalent in some fields more than in others, biology/medicine for example. When you read, for example, "loop of Henle" or "circle of Willis" you don't even know where to begin. You either know the term or not.
True, though I think it's often a larger challenge to capture the intrinsic quality of a medicinal compound or physiological feature than a man-made tool.
What came before "reverse proxies"? Just curious to understand the history.
Forward proxies, proxies where client machines were configured to route all their outbound traffic through (similar to a router). Usually performed caching back in the day when the Internet tube was slow, later on got SSL decryption capabilities and filtering lists to make sure you stay off of your naughty sites and so the proxy admin could decrypt your banking credentials.
Nowadays, "reverse" is suppressed in most ways. I have heard that Nginx is a proxy more often than a reverse proxy.
Except in the configuration where you use the reversep_proxy directive, of course
How about service proxy vs web proxy rather than reverse proxy and proxy? Makes more clear that one is a proxy on the service side and the other is a proxy on the client side. Service proxy and Client proxy might be even better.
Since web proxy was originally used near clients, caching stuff to save precious bandwidth of their kbps-tier connection.