> And, managing dependencies is like dealing with explosives anyways...
Only funny for anyone who hasn't been affected by one, or had friends or family who were. Still better to avoid names with negative connotations (and search for them first to check).
Just in Germany for example there are a ton of companies called ISIS (just google "ISIS GmbH").
Being offended by a three letter shell command seems a bit over the top to me to be honest.
Edit: I won't respond to further comments on the naming issue. It wasn't my intention to name it after a weapon. As I said earlier, I will change the name as soon as anyone proposes a better one.
Yeah, but when people do a google search for IED, what are they going to find?
I'd worry less about offending someone because they had to type it, and more about SEO. I'd stick with things that don't have pictures of gore and destruction on the first page of search results.
So, that's a really good reason to not.
Also, your response was shitty... You specifically state that you chose IED because it's "easy to type"... but when someone says "Hey, that's what we call bombs that insurgents use to kill people with", you reply "Yeah, but the alternative is an acronym used by JP Morgan... People getting offended by me naming something after a way to kill people are being over the top". If "IED" happened to actually mean something, fine, make a case... but it isn't actually easier to type than anything else... If you want that, name it ASD, which shouldn't have any conflicts, as the top google search result is Anchorage School District... and I couldn't find any conflicting package names.
I get it, people are constantly picking on things and suggesting that they need to be more PC... but in this case, there is absolutely NO reason for you to stick with the name IED... and several reasons to change it (SEO, offensiveness, typability).
Also, good news for german companies... The news has started using different acronyms for ISIS... I've seen IS and ISIL in regards to the paris bombings, as they're more true to the literal translation.
> That being said, it's a three letter name. It's very unlikely NOT to run into naming conflicts here.
It isn't critical to avoid all possible naming conflicts, only to avoid 1) other command-line tools and 2) names in poor taste. Thus, only the conflicts with other package managers really matter.
I wouldn't worry about naming conflicts per se, just unfortunate or misleading ones (e.g. company names).
I think "bpm" is a clever name for a faster npm client because "beats per minute" is a speed measurement and thus associated with something going really fast.
IED on the other hand has the association of people dying or being crippled by terrorists.
Only funny for anyone who hasn't been affected by one, or had friends or family who were.
Oh, lay off the holier-than-thou moral outrage. I bet you could mine for naming collisions in a space of three characters like this all day, or really all sorts of project names.
With two letters it gets even better. I was offered ss.com but passed, later I thought I should have taken it and turned it into a site documenting the atrocities committed by the SS and to strongly attack neo-nazis by showing them for what they are. Missed opportunity.
I don't think the name is supposed to be funny. If you're afraid of naming things something just because someone, somewhere in the world have been affected by what you're naming your thing, you'll run out of names.
Its more the case that the set of people that could take offense to something is effectively infinite.
Say the programmer has english as a second language, its really easy not to know "common" things like this. Taking outrage in these cases is not in very good faith as the presumption is that the name is the same thing as the acronym in question.
Lets say they chose to name it baa, and people reacted to it thusly:
- what is this implying all users are sheep! needs to be changed/boycotted
- ...
- this makes no sense, name it after its function xyz.
- this is a horrible name, I'm going to encourage everyone I know not to use this
Sometimes people CANNOT be pleased or appeased or even bargained with when they respond to things from the pathos mindset. Make an effort sure but recently people seem to be going out of their way to be offended. As a fan of debate and arguing I hate that the presumption in these debates presumes bad intent. That style of thinking eventually leads to a very closed mindset.
I always thought the name of git/github was mildly offensive to me... but never really enough to speak out about. Though I think that ASD mentioned above (I added "Another Stupid Deployment") isn't a bad name.
This post will attract those of conservative/libertarian mentality who like to stand for our right to use language that may offend people, but I just want to add another vote for changing the name.
I am not particularly sensitive to these things, but upon reading the name, an image came to mind of a soldier leaning against a concrete wall on a dusty urban street, leg recently blown off, bleeding out, in shock. That image is now permanently associated with your project for me :)
For comparison, imagine if you'd called it "iud". At least in American society, this is more readily agreed to be offensive because of our sex taboo and gender inequality.
For a lot of people, the thought of war evokes deep visceral feelings of horror and fear. Such people will be less likely to use your project, which you could argue is a form of discrimination, and in any case doesn't benefit anyone.
I had a project that got really popular and went through like 5 name changes. It was a horrible experience. My advice to anyone who is ever involved in naming a software project:
spend no more than 2 minutes picking a name, and stick with it
This is why developers should try to avoid introducing dependencies. Not at all costs, of course, but typical project in JavaScript, Go, Ruby, or Python has way, way too many dependencies, while little of them have any significant benefit.
Delegating things to a library you give up control over any bugs the library
has. You can't simply fix the bug like you would do to your code, you either
need to fork the library (maintaining a fork has cost), patch it (maintaining
the patch is not free), or send fixes to its maintainer -- or any combination
of these.
Using many dependencies also makes your application a fractal of dependencies.
Library you use has its own dependencies, which have their own dependencies,
which have... And so on. If you happen to want to put your application to
DEB/RPM packages properly, host your app's dependencies locally to isolate
from network outages, or do virtually anything non-trivial with your app, you
hit the list of dependencies very hard.
It's not to say dependencies are evil; like any generalization, this would be
simply stupid. But they have their cost, and it's large. You'd better make
sure a library really simplifies your life before adding it to your project.
And writing custom code to duplicate a library doesn't have a cost? (compared to forking).
I find that using tools like npm, nuget, gems, and the like along with github for core libraries makes managing dependencies FAR better than relying on an internal copy of said package in my project, which is just as risky as an internal fork. Yes, there's a chance the package system can be down while you are wanting to deploy.. that's why you prepare on a staging server, and duplicate that to production. Hell with things like docker, you create your container, and run it with environment variables for which environment it's running against.
Did you run your name by /anyone/ whatsoever before posting this? I can't imagine that if you'd say, asked three people, one of them wouldn't have laughed at the very suggestion. IED indeed. This is the sort of silly mistake one can only make if one is acting in isolation: to me it's super important in life to be checking in with people constantly when making decisions like this. Typically a couple of people will do it: after that, for me in my circle anyway, the returns diminish. What a waste of people's time and energy on this forum, just because you didn't bother checking with people (I'm assuming). It's kinda selfish of you, in that sense. Well, good luck renaming it, and good luck figuring out where you went wrong.
In fact I literally just renamed it: https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied/commit/84628b3c871c85d...
Originally it was called mpm, but I figured that would have been pretty confusing, but it looks like the new name isn't necessarily better.
I'm pretty terrible at naming. Any suggestions are more than welcome!