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Comment by IndrekR | Hacker News Reader

Major confusion for me, as SPICE is well known circuit simulator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE

Using it often. Mostly via ngspice nowadays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngspice

I would never call a software project SPICE; I use a fucking search engine when naming things to avoid the cringe of ignorantly landing on a dupe. (And also use SPICE in the LTSpice incarnation; I should give ngspice a spin one of these days.)

You're absolutely fucking right.

Ngspice is okay but it's a bit clumsy switching between it and xschem.

Agreed. The SPICE electronics simulator is over fifty years old, and is still very important to people who have to design electronics. It's inside many other electronics design tools. It's standard enough that when a manufacturer comes out with a new analog IC, they often provide a SPICE model for it. Otherwise nobody wants to design it into their circuit. Reusing the name for another program is like calling something new FORTRAN.

(I had nothing to do with SPICE, other than as a user. It's by Laurence Nagel, and I'm John Nagle. Not related.)

We could speedrun this and just call every product "the thing".

That name's already used by an even older technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%...

Once interviewed for an automotive embedded software position and they asked me if I was familiar with SPICE. Naturally assumed they meant the circuit simulator, answered yes and they did not dig deeper

Only later in the job I realized that they had meant Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination.

dEtermination. Also quite confusing.

They’re only concerned with capability determination, not name determination. Some people just have no SPINE when it comes to naming things.

It is called ASPICE.

"The abbreviation SPICE stands for Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination. Automotive SPICE (also commonly abbreviated as ASPICE) combines a process reference model and a process assessment model in one standard"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_SPICE

In automotive it's known as SPICE, because the automotive is obvious.

People who work with virtualization on Linux will (hopefully) all know what SPICE is.

Edit: typo

> with visualization on Linux

You mean ‘virtualization’ here, I guess.

Nope. I work with virtualization on Linux every day, and have done so for many years (and many varieties of virtualization). I didn't recognize it by the name, and I don't remember hearing about it before.

People who know what both of them are (hello) still won't know which one the headline is talking about.

The circuit one is definitely older, probably has more users, and is just as relevant in this forum.

Yes, a circuit simulator.

Indeed, it was what we used in digital circuits lab exercises back in the 90's.

I am happy I am not alone in this

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