The state of naming things in 2020

[jsborjesson]

• gimp

This is meant as an humorous post categorising naming conventions, perhaps spurring a few laughs and helping someone name their passion project - perhaps even having some educational value in giving you a name for all these.

• unofficial open source library naming convention

  • = 2 possible pronunciations, or preferably unpronounceable

  • it has to be a pun
  • can only vaguely hint at the function of the library through a reference to either an animal, the last name of a historical figure, or a similar software from the 80s.
• TLAs
• recursive acronyms
  • GNU is Not Unix
• long words
  • i18n
  • k8s
  • a11y
  • the keyboard equivalent of slurring your words
  • numeronyms https://a11yproject.com/posts/a11y-and-other-numeronyms/
• I can't have spaces
  • snake (easier to read and you read code more often than you type it, which makes it objectively better than camel for programming, come at me bro)
  • camel
  • kebab
  • shout
• I can have spaces, and that's way too much freedom
  • git commit guidelines
  • title case is hard
• I am an academic
  • maximum 1 letter per variable
• I want to be associated with the values of Apple to get traction and credibility but not so much traction that Apple will find out and sue me for everything I own and win
  • iProduct
• The "let's just use a normal word from a language I speak that isn't English"
  • nokogiri
  • every single product from IKEA
• The "regular word in English with an affix of the language/framework I wrote it in/for:
  • Every app on KDE
  • Every Java library
  • Every JavaScript library
• The "I chose a .io domain for my product name and now it's officially called product name dot eye oh."
• The Filefile file naming convention
  • Makefile, Rakefile, Gemfile, Dockerfile
  • Adopted by files which will hopefully only ever have exactly one per project, and will have an entirely custom format