[paulhallett]

I like this idea, but this is suffering from too many buzz words that it's almost too difficult to understand. Embalmer, Curse, Archeologist? There's some pretty thin analogies to draw from. This won't make the system easier to understand, and it might actually affect adoption.

I once heard about a team that rebuilt a whole suite of micro services using names from Lord of the Rings, but the names didn't reflect the service's functions at all, so the system was instantly unusable due to the confusing terminology.

Keep the terminology simple.

[juancampa]

Homebrew [1] suffers from the same issue and it's horrible. What the hell is a keg, a cask? what is pouring? a cellar? what? I've been using it for years and I haven't bother to find out, but the fact that it's not immediately obvious is a sign of bad UX IMO.

1: https://brew.sh

[foobiekr]

It’s worse because once you look it up, it’s a bunch of forced metaphors where the priority was being cute rather than being useful.

[viraptor]

That one and Chef (https://docs.chef.io/cookbooks/ - cookbooks, recipes). It's a bad idea to abuse naming like that.

[ricc]

Their usage of cookbooks and recipes is actually fine. Kitchen can be confusing sometimes but generally still fine... Knife is the most confusing of all. But what I really hate about Chef terms is they make searching with DDG really difficult.

[rvnx]

Let's talk about the elephant in the room: Ruby with its gems and poetry.

How are you even supposed to know what Nokogiri is about ?

[viraptor]

I haven't even thought of rubygems and I deal with them every day. I'm curious now - they don't seem like a comparable issue for some reasons. Maybe because it's just one level? The language is Ruby which is arbitrary and the packages are gems which is connected in naming, but there's nothing more in language itself, right?

[m463]

What the heck is a gnu? or a grep or a yacc / bison?

:)

[lostmsu]

These are terrible names too.

[nix23]

>a gnu

A Gnu that's not Unix

>Grep

Global regular expression print

>yacc

yet another compiler compiler

>bison

well...i don't know :)

[m463]

now do hurd/hird :)

[nix23]

That's a herd of servers...often consisting of gnu's but in the middle caries a mach capable aircraft who just looks like a Gnu :)

[gtvwill]

Couldn't agree more! I've been down voted like hell on HN for mentioning how much difficulty I have with names of products in the Tech realm, got down voted hard for pointing out Cider was a dumb name for a program...legit its a name for a drink, thats been around longer than the program. What the hell is with Techies and not being able to come up with their own names for stuff?

I come from construction, truck driving and concreting. If you say its a duck its a duck. I've gotten to the point I just won't recommend businesses that do that kinda stuff it makes on-boarding new users a unnecessary PITA.

[qqii]

I am struggling to think of better terms, and using the original game theory or specific terms don't help either.