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by CoastalCoder 1613 days ago
It's not just you.

I have trouble going near CockroachDB because of its name. It's absolutely unjustifiable from an engineering perspective, but the effect (for me, at least) is real.

4 comments

I have a few of those projects as well.

MongoDB because mongo is a derogartory word in my language. It is an abbreviation of Mongoloid, was (apparently) used to describe people with Down syndrome, thought I've never heard it used for that. It's more colloquially used to describe people who act wierd or something that are stupid or made in a wierd way.

Svelte, the javascript framework is also something I've kind of avoided so far due to its name. While it doesn't really mean anything in my native tongue as far as I know, it is a very plausible word/spelling and it kinda just sounds unappealing. I can't help but reading it like that either.

I always took that to be a reference to "it's so robust, it'll survive nuclear winter," which is pretty cool if true. The last database standing after all other species die off.
Fun fact: the supposed extreme hardiness of cockroaches is something of a myth, and in particular they are not fond of cold (hence their affinity for human domiciles!)

They should rename to TardigradeDB.

Their nuclear hardiness however has been experimentally validated [1], though flour beetles survived even better than cockroaches.

Either way, both using CockroachDB and participating in this thread put cockroaches on my mind a lot more than I'd really prefer. +1 for TardigradeDB.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxCYQvGNoGY

Maybe they should have named it "TwinkieDB".
My favorite example of reasonable name-inspired revulsion was an outfit called "Ink Competent Printers".
Developers are human too. I think it's entirely justified as an engineering decision - if they care so little about people who feel differently about their name, surely they'll have the same lack of consideration for people who want to e.g. use a slightly different API than what they expect.