alt Hacker NewsGNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of BCPL.
Developers haven't "lost the plot", we never had it in the first place.
Inversely, Clang, LLDB, jq, fzf, loc are modern projects perfectly in line with the author's notion of a good name. "mise-en-place" is the perfect metaphor for what mise does.
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Even GNU is a recursive acronym, Emacs a convoluted one... What's Perl, Python, Java... all about? Remember how JavaScript was named? Don't mention Go (go-lang) or Pascal... Git, Mercurial, CVS anyone?
I believe this makes much ado about nothing.
> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for.
Traditionally, according to folklore? "Delete disk" or "destroy data". (Because it was commonly used to write raw disk blocks.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice_2000 was pretty clear about what it did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX less so.
In the same vein, my recollection is reading that the X windowing system is called X because it's the letter after "W", which was the original choice (because it's what the word "window" starts with), but it was already taken, so they went with X.
> what dd stands for
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.folklore.computers/HAWoZ...
The article even refers to AWK as being the initials of the authors. And posits this as "reasonable"?
Naming is hard, not least because "a million" new projects are spawned every day. And if you're going down a path of "rule the world" (even in a niche like infrastructure) you start by getting a .com domain, so choices are limited.
Plus the name has to be unique enough to Google.
This, plus it's less obtuse than drug naming, and about on par with any other random product on the market.
Which is not to claim the general market is full of good names - clearly it is not. But I don't think it's below par at any point in its existence.
The only thing that's different between the era when Bison as named and now is the proliferation. There is vastly more shit in open source with the cute names. Back then, one person could keep all the cute names for everything related to C and Unix in their head.
GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix".
Yacc stands for "Yet Another C Compiler".
Nano was originally TIP which stood for "TIP Isn't Pico" but was later changed to Nano so as not to conflict with another Unix utility called tip [0]. Presumably nano was chosen as the metric prefix next larger than pico.
Personally, I'd prefer choosing a random string of 3-8 letters for command line tools. At least that would be better than naming programs using generic names (Keep, Bamboo, Chef, Salt) which leads to all sorts of name collisions.
From the article:
> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.
The mascot for an $8.8T dollar (supply side) software industry, larger than Google, Microsoft and Apple combined, is a cartoon penguin [1].
"never had it in the first place" is absolutely correct.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_nano
[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...
Naming is a big part of programming, you'd expect software to have good descriptive names.
There are two hard problems in computer science: caching things, naming things and off-by-one errors.
Pretty sure dd is disk destroyer
> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for.
Data(set) Definition. But that name does not make any sense whatsoever by itself in this context, neither for the tool (it hardly "defines" anything), nor for UNIX in general (there are no "datasets" in UNIX).
Instead, it's specifically a reference to the DD statement in the JCL, the job control language, of many of IBM's mainframe operating systems of yore (let's not get into the specifics of which ones, because that's a whole other can of complexity).
And even then the relation between the DD statement and the dd command in UNIX is rather tenuous. To simplify a lot, DD in JCL does something akin to "opening a file", or rather "describing to the system a file that will later be opened". The UNIX tool dd, on the other hand, was designed to be useful for exchanging files/datasets with mainframes. Of course, that's not at all what it is used for today, and possibly that was true even back then.
This also explains dd's weird syntax, which consists of specifying "key=value" or "key=flag1,flag2,..." parameters. That is entirely alien to UNIX, but is how the DD and other JCL (again, of the right kind) statements work.