The author is just wrong. Chemistry is fairly jam-packed with various cutesy names either to amuse the authors or because they’re attempting to make an algorithm memorable to the field.
Off the top of my head:
- SHAKE and RATTLE: Bond constraint algorithms.
- CHARMm: An MD package but you’d never guess it from the name
- Amber: Another MD package that you’d never guess from the name.
- So so many acronyms from NMR: COSY, TOCSY, NOESY
The list goes on and on and permeates most of the subfields in one form or another.
If you want really cutesy names, though, look in molecular biology.
My favourite: MAS, for magic angle spinning. Because every paper needs a bit of magic.
Scientists are the wrong population to pick if you want people who dislike silly names. They are everywhere because we don’t hate fun, and it does make things memorable. We’re also fond of naming things after people, which is as un-descriptive as it gets.
My own field Materials Engineering has:
"Hardness", "Toughness", Resilience", etc. which all describe different properties.
"Ferromagnetic" or "Ferrimagnetic best believe those are different.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...
Notoriously bad exposition I might add ("This is unobtanium. This is what we're here for!").
and at least that exposition makes more sense then the "fountain of youth brain juice" in the sequel, when the humans can literally reincarnate themselves without having to cross interstellar space to do it.
It's funny, because I'm one to use movie references in casual conversation like it's nothing, yet my use was definitely not in this case
Einstein doesn't tell me anything, unlike Müller (miller) and Schmied (Schmiede = Forge)
Lawrencium has entered the chat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_signaling_pathway
Chicago even had the world's first nuclear reactor, but no luck.
Also SHAKE and RATTLE describe the motion-simulation in the algorithm.
Acronyms are abbreviations for meaningful names.
Most of my examples are from computational chemistry, which is software, but (historically) written by chemists.
As one of those chemists (at least before my current work), I feel somewhat qualified to comment on my field and whether it always names things seriously or not.
But if you look around, fun terms are everywhere in chemistry or chemistry-adjacent fields. For example, PALM and STORM (from fluorescence microscopy) were almost certainly chosen because they were easy to remember.
> Also SHAKE and RATTLE describe the motion-simulation in the algorithm.
Not really. SHAKE and RATTLE are bond constraint algorithms to avoid simulating the fast degrees of freedom, typically in solvent.
In molecular dynamics, your time step is effectively set by the fastest degree of freedom (there’s a relationship with the Nyquist theorem here), so it pays to freeze out the vibrations of the O-H bonds in water when you’re simulating a larger system. SHAKE and RATTLE effectively freeze the bond and angle distances near equilibrium while allowing some relaxation.
The rest of the degrees of freedom are typically integrated with a larger time step using a method appropriate for the simulation ensemble (eg: one of the Verlet integrators, a Langevin integrator, etc).
> Acronyms are abbreviations for meaningful names.
Acronyms like XPS, EPR, NMR, etc are like that: dry, short, and meaningful.
But there are a lot that were chosen because they were entertaining to the authors or because they are easy to remember. Even in a technical field, marketing matters.
I think often words are added to allow for a memorable name, such as crispr
> When Mojica and Jansen struck up a correspondence, they began tossing around catchy names for the patterns, and on Nov. 21, 2001, they settled on CRISPR—an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.
https://nautil.us/the-unbearable-weirdness-of-crispr-236685/
But a meteorologist might:
We can argue about namespace pollution and overly long names, but I think there's a point there. When I look at other profession's jargon, I never have the impression they are catching Pokemon like programmers do.
Except for the ones with Latin and Greek names, but old mistakes die hard and they're not bragging about their intelligibility.
Names are just names. It’s nice if they are kind of unique and have no collisions.
But to me it's still unclear what a good naming culture would look like for programmers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_naming_convention...
Which is really funny considering he talks about emacs.
Nothing stops the author from using "Libsodium crypto lib" and "Zephyr RTOS".
You're misremembering. It's the "Windsor V8." Or more specifically the "4.8L Windsor Ford V8."
The Ford 351 is a bit special because there were two different engines made by Ford in the same time period with the same displacement, so they tacked on the city they were manufactured in (Windsor or Cleveland).
In this example, you added "chopper", "patrol boat", and "handgun" to disambiguate them. There wouldn't have been enough context to do so otherwise, which IMHO is more aligned with the point the author was making.
If you were in the middle of a conversation about helicopters with people who knew lots of helicopter models, just saying "Cobra" would probably be fine. But in the software world, there are far too many obscure and new tools that are not at all clear without context. And the context just always happens to be all the dang things. A cutesy name could be any dang thing.
> It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.
I think you're just being selective because you disagree. A better example was:
> “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.”
If we want to cherry pick, your comment has:
> When you open your medicine cabinet
You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new. It's common usage and doesn't need to be disrupted by someone overly proud of a basic thing they made. You didn't call it Wapsooie, a "playful" take on WPSU (Wall-mounted pharmaceutical storage unit) or a MMC (Materia medica cabinet), or a whole host of other cutesy names or even acronyms that you might eventually get to if you were talking about medicine cabinets all day long, or designing or building them.
I mostly agree with the author. Software tools think they're so hilarious. I mean, the Virgil compiler is named "Aeneas" internally. Yet the cli command is "v3c"--Virgil III compiler.
> I read a lot into software history, and I can’t really say that there was an era of fantastic naming (even very experienced engineers made some very silly naming) but at least some current was trying to make some sense in the 80s; grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference).
"diff" is a good name. There is no sane argument that "awk" conveys anything meaningful about what the tool does. "grep" is utterly opaque until you know what it's an acronym for. The name itself conveys absolutely nothing. "cat" is actively misleading because it is a word, but the tool has nothing to do with felines at all.
The author only likes those names because they're familiar with them, not because they're good names.
> You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new.
Sure. That's because I only have one medicine cabinet.
If I go on homedepot.com and search for medicine cabinets, the bold text is "Glacier Bay", "Zenith", "Kohler", etc.
What's frustrating about this article is that the author doesn't even realize why software packages have these funny names. Let's say I want to make a JavaScript package for parsing command-line arguments. Seems like "argparse" is a pretty clear name for that. Taken. Maybe "cliparse"? Taken. "args", "cli", "options", "argparser", "cli_argparser". Yup, all taken.
Packages need unique names so that package managers and imports can refer to them unambiguously. You can namespace them with the author's name but that just makes it confusing to talk about when two people say "args" but don't realize that one of them is talking about "@some_rando/args" and the other is talking about "@weird_startup/args".
So people just pick cute names. The name is an identifier, not a descriptor.
There is no real problem here, the author is just being cranky.
This article would certainly disagree with you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def...
> the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait.
Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?".
> The Hoover Dam is a dam, named after the president who commissioned it, not “Project Thunderfall” or “AquaHold.”
It was actually called the "Boulder Canyon Project" while being built, referred to as "Hoover Dam" even though finished during the Roosevelt administration, officially called "Boulder Dam", and only later officially renamed to "Hoover Dam".
The fact that Herbert Hoover initiated the project tells you nothing meaningful about it. Would "Reitzlib" be a better name than "Requests"?
> If you wrote 100 CLIs, you will never counter with a cobra.
But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc.
> No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.
When you open your medicine cabinet, do you look for a jar labeled "acetylsalicylic acid", "2-propylvaleric acid", or "N-acetyl-para-aminophenol"? Probably not.
It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.