[bheadmaster]

> why? It's just a really strange choice.

I personally thought it was a witty name. Had a tiny mental chuckle when I read it.

Better question is, why not? If it's not offensive, then what is the reason you "wish they had called it something else"?

> It's just a really strange choice

Doesn't sound like a real criticism to me...

[kotxig]

Let's just put it this way, I'm not advertising in anything associated with my professional credibility that I use "lunatic", for the very obvious reason that it's possibly offensive to some people and that the word offers nothing to convey meaning. I don't have to find it personally offensive to not want to associate with it.

[thingification]

I can understand that as a heuristic.

On the other hand, there are other people who might apply a different heuristic and guess that a project named 'lunatic' is less likely to attract the sort of people who might take, for example, a code of conduct as a tool to beat other contributors about the head. (I'm not saying that's you!)

I guess there are "swings and roundabouts" and peoples' rules of thumb differ, which is perhaps diversity that's all to the good.

[kotxig]

I think brainf*k is a great example of a potentially offensive name that actually conveys meaning and doesn't harm adoption by its intended audience.

[thingification]

To me (without reading any of their stuff, I don't know if this is what they were shooting at), "lunatic" makes me think "high performance" and "this is a very difficult project with high payoff if we succeed, we're a little bit crazy (in a good way) to try, eh?".