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by lucb1e 17 days ago
Why call it "Ant" and not "Antjs" or "Ant.js" when there is already Ant from Apache? https://ant.apache.org
5 comments

Ant in JS land is already claimed and huge too lol

https://ant.design/

Tangent but what a horrible website at least on my android. Starts as light mode, suddenly shows three streched columns, turns to dark mode and the title is hidden behind the header. After years of being around how can they end up with something like this
Whenever I'm bored, I go to the ant-design site to see how long it takes to find the first gross accessibility violation. This time it was the dropdown just above the fold, which wasn't keyboard controllable.
I bounced when I saw the three broken columns but never even saw the dark mode switch. It’s that slow.
Completely broken on iOS as well. Feels like AI slop.
It's existed for a lot longer than LLM generated code has
It's gotten much worse than I used to remember it, though. It used to be pretty bad before too, but it at least had an ok homepage.
It was always far too buggy for my liking as-is, though it’s amusing that somehow that’s become worse over time it seems
It is funny that people now instinctively think of AI when encountering slop, as if the slop that the AI produces was not deeply informed by the slop it trained on. Plus, the quality bar on the web has always been low, masking the true capability of LLMs.
ant design is a design system that the marquee title is underneath the top nav. it has at least three major fousc on mobile dark mode ios page load. both are clasic blunders documented and well solved since early bootstrap era. hardly a project worth owning “ant” in the js ecosystem.

apache ant (another neat tool) is from the java ecosystem (and can be used outside of it) that has largely been replaced by maven, which is gradually being replaced gradle.

this project seems to only overlap with either in that it uses javascript (or the word java).

There’s also Adam Ant. Who was also a household name.

Some people have also heard of ants of the formicidaen variety.

Yes because those are in the same web development/javascript adjacent vertical, of course!
Neither is Apache Ant not Anthropic CLI yet they’re cited a lot in this discussion too.
I'm the first user and contributor to Apache Ant outside of Sun Microsystems when James gave it to me, and I could care less that someone else used the same name.
Could or couldn't?
couldn't... sorry for bad engrish.
Yes. You would only name it ant if you wanted to taint the first impression of anyone that’s been coding for a couple decades or more.
Or if you have only started in the last few years and never heard of those older projects.
And could not be bothered to make the tiniest cursory check to see if the name was already in use by a well known project.
It's pretty difficult to tell whether something is, or was at some point, a well known project. Things that were major 20 years ago but are no longer used tend to become invisible since search engines prioritize recent knowledge.

For example, I think young developers would not know that SOAP was a major, like really major, technology in the 2000's. If you google for SOAP now, you get "cleaning products" mostly, and if you're lucky a single mention of the protocol - but unless you dig deeper, it's hard to find out it was actually THE industry standard for web services at some point.

IMO it's exactly the same with Ant (I used Apache Ant a lot in my early days as a dev!! But I've seen how very few Java devs know it these days, it's one of those things only the older guys know, plus a few younger one who have an interest in build systems in general and their history).

I thought the same thing as I [half] read the title.
I assumed it was a framework from Alibaba, coming out of their Ant Group, where Ant Design also came from.