alt Hacker NewsI strongly agree with this. And what bothers me more than obscure or meaningless names like Viper are silly and embarrassing names like Hunchentoot. Names like that sometimes cause people to dismiss good software. It’s like using Comic Sans in a serious research paper.
One area of the sciences does partly use names like this, and that is biology. Biologists do sometimes name a species after a famous person, as in the louse Strigiphilus garylarsoni:
I agree. One recent example is in the Zig community a popular tool for benchmarking is "poop" [1] (Performance Optimizer Observation Platform). It could have easily been "pop" (Performance Observation Platform) and been cute enough without being intentionally cringe. Every time I see Zig now I think about "poop".
[1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/poop