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Comment by socketcluster | Hacker News Reader

The name Phoenix is overused. There is an Elixir framework called Phoenix. I think I also heard of other projects with that same name before.

It's a bit like the name 'Apollo'; besides the moon landing project, I know like 2 dev projects called that and also there is a sales SaaS platform with that name.

Surely people should run a search first before choosing a name...

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From the ashes of some previous project is born some new project.

It's symbolic.

I remember people naming new software projects this back in the 1980s for the same reason.

It's a great name but way overused. I guess everything these days rose from ashes of past failures. Sector is highly competitive.

Ya, and that's the same reason all those other projects picked this name too

Not in the case of Elixir. It’s a play on BEAM processes being revived.

We get the symbolic reason. It’s still overused and lazy because it doesn’t even relate to the project itself except for its origin in the most generic way.

They could at least use PhoenX or FenX to link it with X

Remember when every project acronym used to be YA-something for “Yet Another…”? Or when recursive acronyms were the hot trend?

Don't forget startup names that randomly dropped vowels. I don't miss the days of twttr.

I can second the Apollo thing. I think it might just be a natural name to give something, because when I was a kid I was working on a voice assistant thing instead of touching grass (never finished it) and called it Apollo. This was probably my first project.

How many X servers named Pheonix are there? Surely it doesn't matter if there are frameworks and libraries of the same name in other areas. It's inevitable to have collisions like this.

I think all the cool one-word names are used, and overused, by now.

Firefox tried to use it and was sued for trademark infringement. wxPython also has a Phoenix project. It's definitely a catchy, but overused, name.

I don’t think the problem was with “phoenix”.

It was Project Phoenix (resurrection of the Netscape browser). This resulted in the Firebird browser (Firebird and Thunderbird). But Firebird was an existing database that objected to the name. So, we got Firefox instead.

At least that is how I remember it.

Wasn't it renamed because of these people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies

Yes, and that was just the start lol... https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-holds-fire-in-naming-f...

Yeah, me too. https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-holds-fire-in-naming-f...

All the first 3 names were taken. They probably had to bribe even the holders of the Firefox trademark to get it (though the terms were never disclosed).

Mozilla was sued to rename Firefox (like I said) by one Phoenix Technologies. If I remember right, they picked two bad names before picking "Firefox" but I don't remember the other one.

Firefox was Firebird, not Phoenix.

I think Firebird was the second name they tried to use that was already taken. They were definitely sued by Phoenix Technologies for one incident. Bryan Lunduke has a podcast explaining the history of this but I saw the one about Phoenix on the Wikipedia page before posting.

Edit: Here you go: https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-holds-fire-in-naming-f...

Phoenix in the Elixir ecosystem is probably one of the less confusing name uses. Under that stack you get such clear library framework names as: bandit, cowboy, thousand island, and ranch. As well as mint and finch. When not riffing off of previous project names with off axis alternate names, it’s always some sort of ExThing sharing space with at least 3 other varieties of the same (e.g. ThingEx, Thingx, and ExaThing), and you're left guessing which one may have emerged as a conventional standard.

Better not ask them to think outside the box or they'll come up with something like fushichou.

There’s an AI coding tool called phoenix.love as well

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