[treve]

Congrats on this release!

However, I think the library name is a bit of a poor choice. I don't want to take away your thunder, I just picked this post to do my rant :).

There seems to be a lot of new general-purpose libraries with very poor non-descriptive names coming out.

Whenever I need to dive into a new codebase, in a language and ecosystem I'm unfamiliar with, it's extremely hard to figure out which dependency and library does what. I was tasked to dive into a massive RoR application recently, and I ended up having to write a glossary first to remember what every non-descriptive noun implied.

After getting familiar with a particular language's ecosystem, this problem becomes tends to go away, and as a library writer, it becomes easier to fall into the same trap by picking a name that's marketable and distinct.

But I feel we're collectively making it increasingly harder for people to ramp up in new ecosystems and maintain future legacy codebases.

For names of large applications this is not as bad, and some of these applications become household names, but I think we should try to avoid this for general-purpose utilities.

[Void_]

I wonder how much this matters to other developers –

but I, at least subconsciously, when faced with a library choice, take into account things like:

- Simple, pretty name (Alamofire is very nice-sounding and memorable – even feels like overkill, author should've saved it for an iPhone app or something.)

- The pretty logo

- The perfect use of Markdown (I'm so obsessed about using `` around everything that looks like code it feels like a psychological condition)

- Clear structure of README

- Simple examples with syntax highlighting

There must be correlation between the presentation and quality of the source code!

[teacup50]

> There must be correlation between the presentation and quality of the source code!

There isn't.

The overlap is relatively small between:

- People who are great at writing software.

- People who are great at designing logos and quality of presentation (or have someone on staff that is).

[matttthompson]

You make some good points, and I agree to caution against names that bear no semantic relationship with their purpose. My justification of Alamofire is that it reflects the history of the project, which traces back from AFNetworking to Gowalla (formerly Alamofire, Inc.), the product for which it was originally developed.

[treve]

Ah I didn't realize the link to the AF in AFNetworking.

For what it's worth, I do love how the name sounds :)

[krschultz]

The alternative is non-memorable names. I can't tell you how many android-async-image-loader libraries there are. It's a lot easier to remember 'Picasso'. It's also a lot easier for me to Google for 'Picasso Android' and get relevant results.

[treve]

A better alternative is a combination of both, such as : [fancynoun-purpose]. For example: alamo-http

[altyus]

I think Mattt can get away with this as he has the most well known open source library for cocoa development.

[treve]

I'm not a cocoa developer, and I don't really know who matt is, or what library that may be ;). Once I'm a seated cocoa developer I probably will though, but then my general point no longer really applies.

[realusername]

I feel this is a trend now with new projects, it's also the case in Node.js, Go and new Python packages.

This can go as absurd as the package named "a" in npm (https://www.npmjs.org/package/a) which is used by a lot other packages. I also had some trouble to figure out what each package is suppose to do when using RoR.

However, I would not say it's necessary easier in older languages when I see the amount of weird acronyms used in the Java world.

[Kalium]

Ruby does this too. Thor, God, bluepill, and pony all come to mind.