Hacker News Reader

It is unfortunate so many projects have overlapping names, even playing off the same kind of puns.

This: NaCL + Sodium

Google: NaCl (Native Client) + Pepper

DJB's NaCL is an academic project that dates at least back to 2008.

I'm just lamenting to no one in particular that in the universe of available words/acronyms/abbreviations to describe projects we have as many collisions as we do. If I had to choose (ugh), DJB's NaCL acronym is at least more specific to its purpose than NaCl meaning "Native Client" just to make a salt + pepper pun. I guess all I'm saying is that if I ever write an open-source slab allocator, I won't call it OpenSSl.

Of course not. You'd call it "6 Minute Slabs".

djb's NaCl and Google's NaCl appeared around the same time. The naming conflict is unfortunate, but it happens.

Hopefully Sodium doesn't suffer from the same namespace collision.

It's not quite as bad as Maxima (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29), though, where it almost feels like the project was intentionally named in a way to make googling difficult.

Like Go?

C, D, R, Io, ...

Most single letters are taken for programming languages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

The APL guys had it figured out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com