[nikonp]

One of the founders here. I totally see where you’re coming from. If you come from a world where log equals text, then using log for anything else seems strange.

In robotics and autonomy, “log” is commonly used for e.g. sensor data or planning decisions as well. But even outside those fields it isn’t uncommon to talk about logging metrics for instance.

Still, no metaphor is perfect and we have spent a lot of time discussing what word to use. “Record” gives me the sense that the main purpose is to save the data for later. Rerun is also about the live use case. There words like “stream” or “send” could work perhaps.

In the end we decided on “log” because it is short, is already used in a similar way in some of the areas we hope Rerun will be used, and because data can either be stored on disk and/or be streamed/uploaded somewhere (like with regular text logs).