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by 50CNT 3808 days ago
There's a lot more of those, isn't there. I still remember the time I got on HN and couldn't tell the tech announcements from the news articles. Can't remember any exact titles, but stuff along the lines of "Coffee.net now ships Espresso". Is that a site that sells elixir of life or some kind of javascript and .NET amalgamation shipping a new library?

Go, Python, Lisp, C, C#, Java, all these words getting double booked to make them memorable. If I want to find a place to fix my lisp, do I go on stack-overflow or to a speech therapist? Book on Go patterns? "Java island book"?

But luckily nowadays we can abuse word connections to get google to spit out the right things. "Python generators" may refer to a machine to generate snakes, but short of living in an xkcd comic, it'll probably return the right results. It just gets a little muddled when developers find just the right collocation to name their pet python [project?]. But then we just heap on more specifiers. Unless you decide to call your library "THE" in a fit of genius.

Like Tabasco in your eyes, it just adds spice to your search experience, doesn't it.

2 comments

... off to start the THE project...
Shoot for something absolutely essential, destined to be widely used, and if you feel that sadistic streak shining through, start using a word frequency list[0] to name project parts. "of", "and", "in", "to", "in", "I" and "that" will make for marvellous library names, especially if you find a way to hack around the reserved words of your language of choice. Java and C seem like appropriate choices of language, assuming key parts are actually written in Whitespace and/or Brainf*ck. Make it open source, and nest the layers of WTF so it seems like something you could dive into easily.

Maybe if you make all the bad development choices deliberately, you'll actually end up with a beautiful project, because the reverse seems to happen quite frequently.

[0]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

That is not the reason I decided against using Groovy on a project (JVM level was), but it would have made life somewhat harder.
Most names of programming languages are based on nouns (e.g. Ruby, Python, Lisp, Java) or noun-like (C, C#, PHP), whereas very few are based on adjectives (only know of Basic and Groovy) or verbs (only know of Go).