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Supermancholast Friday at 1:35 AM0 repliesview on HN

How do you discriminate between 2 different things that ostensibly have similar features, but do it in different ways without getting very large names? What if you modify software or just part of it to make it something distinctively new, should it keep the name or add to it? What if I revert that non-trivial feature and add a different non-trivial one. Now what is it?

I would hope the author realizes the core counterpoint when re-reading "We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue" - because the real names, are the roles the tools play. The implementation name is incidental and amorphous, since you can make wild changes to software, rendering the name without much utility beyond a project label. Project labels are necessarily opaque, for the same good reasons software is. The ideals are more important than the details. They are a conflux of interests and plans, not a market label. If market labels were fixed to functionality, the world would be worse off for obvious reasons of practicality and marketability. Ironically, Stallman is completely comfortable with PostgreSQL which is semantic context adjacent, charitably. It describes a small element of the project (a synthetic SQL syntax), not the project itself.