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Comment by msutherl | Hacker News Reader

It really disappoints me when good projects are given names that trigger bad mental associations.

Sure, everybody loves bacon – except vegans, vegetarians, Jews, and other swine-shunning cultures – but I really don't want to be thinking about bacon when I'm programming. Nor do I want to evoke the smell, taste, and unhealthiness of bacon, nor the dirtiness of pigs, in the minds of people I talk to about Bacon.

Largely for this reason I will probably not try, use, or try to get my friends to use Bacon. Please consider changing the name, perhaps to something that evokes the conceptual spirit of the project, because I'd like to see more people adopting FRP techniques.

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personally, my biggest name-related gripe is ungoogleableness.

I often browse google for solutions, but I miss a lot of interesting, popular, relevant blogs when the project name is a common noun utterly unrelated to the project. I recognise naming is difficult, but it makes it hard to find popular, interesting, relevant blogs when I have to swim though the mass of web pages that use the common noun.

Sometimes I wish more projects would call themselves FRP20x14qq77aciq or something approaching uniqueness. Almost like 0x10c. At least until we get some semantic tags to say "and I mean something to do with programming and definately not anything to do with what this common noun means 99.9999% of the time".

Works great: https://www.google.de/search?q=bacon+js

Until someone calls it just bacon. Inevitable.

Which will then be confused with the Ruby testing library.

At least there the naming sort of makes sense. Spec sounds like Speck, which is German for bacon (sort of).

Sad to see you downvoted. Apparently responsible naming is a valid HN topic only when the library has titillating name with gender bias like upskirt [1] or pantyshot [2].

Maybe a better name would be pigfucker.js so as to more equitably offend everyone. But that's probably not necessary since I bet bacon.js was named after Francis Bacon anyway - right nullzzz? :-)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729320

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2748669

Good point about Francis Bacon – that didn't occur to me and, for my own uses, I might be able to drive out the mental associations by fixating on Sir Francis.

Choosing a name is hard if you consider coolness, pronounceableness, googleableness, politically-correctness and so on. Also at the time I was choosing a name for a hobby project, not an Enterprise Framework. Feel free to make a veggie fork :)

So you would never use Satan.js? And if your dad was killed by a gnu, you would only use BSD's? I hope you like apples and windows, it's a tough business if you don't...

How would you cool yourself if you didn't have sweat glands? Blaming pigs for being unhygenic is like blaming cancer patients for not having hair.

> So you would never use Satan.js?

I happen to find Satanic imagery a bit cool, so I probably wouldn't mind, but others might. Would you use a project called Vomit.js? Diarrhea.js? Ebola.js?

> And if your dad was killed by a gnu, you would only use BSD's?

Um, perhaps?

> I hope you like apples and windows

Apples and windows are relatively benign objects without disturbing imagery attached to them.

> How would you cool yourself if you didn't have sweat glands? Blaming pigs for being unhygenic is like blaming cancer patients for not having hair.

Who's blaming pigs? Pigs, their mud, and their parasites are simply unsavory to think of for many people. Likewise, bacon itself is so savory that my mouth starts watering and I can't stop thinking about salty fat. For others, bacon is either disgusting or something to be shunned.

> Apples and windows are relatively benign objects without disturbing imagery attached to them.

I think this is how most people think of bacon.

i feel the same way about Celery.

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