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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

I love the fact that you keep trying to define your own vocubulary 'Deck' etc, but always have to explain it. Best to stick with the more eaily understood term, rather than invent your own, I think.

Unless you're going to try and trademark them all.

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Yeah, these are my only problem with the service; I did not get the metaphors at all, and their descriptions only added to the confusion.

The simplicity of the service is an opportunity to attract people without a lot of webdev chops, so why not make it super simple?

I agree with this. I recently wrote a bunch of new Dockerfiles. The Dockerfile name is sort of meh, but "Deck" is not really telling me what its for.

Heroku created almost as many new terms as Tolkien, and they seem to have made out just fine.

While I agree with your comment, I hope it isn't used as a measure or justification for doing so. I've had the same cognitive problem with Heroku as the parent describes.

God this drives my absolutely insane. Elvish marketing speak is such a stupid waste of time. Why can't we stick to commonly accepted terms instead of trying to bake up new "Cloud"esque replacement terms.

Looked at Heruko once, but all the custom lingo really put me off it.. But, of course your point about them being successful stands

It's worth a shot if they fit your use case. Once you get past the ninja-speak of choosing size and database, it's really simple.

For rake/rails apps at least, you just run `heroku run 'command'` and you're done.

Thanks - we discussed that a lot - we were trying to make a simple 3 steps process. If we get a lot of feedback that it's confusing we'll ditch it.

I think you need to define your own language if it's better. 'Deck' is clearly better than 'Dockerfile'.

Feel free to innovate - you're a startup, and it's what we love about you.

Wouldn't "Container" fit the analogy best?

I think that even if [deck drop instance] is clearer than [dockerfile image container] it would be better to use [dockerfile image container] it's the standard set forth from docker, sticking to the standard makes interoperating easier for everyone.

I agree with this, though I'm biased because I personally find [dockerfile image container] clearer than [deck drop instance]. Explicit > flashy.

I'd have to agree that the standard Docker terminology would be much preferred. Your business covers what is a pretty cutting edge, advanced concept right now. Your customers are likely to be at least somewhat understanding of the standard terminology. Your custom terminology tripped me up as well, despite having a reasonable grasp of the higher level Docker terminology.

Other than that, this looks great! I'm excited for you guys.

I'm in a similar problem space to you. After a year of defining my own 'simpler' terminology, decided to abandon it in favour of being consistent with the more popular albeit complex terminology.

I hope that saves you some time.

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