Why the name?

https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName

by xai3luGi • 11 years ago

352 93 11 years ago

wiki.debian.org

cardamomo• 11 years ago

The etymology of Unix programs: very interesting! The writers of this page also have a sense of humor:

bc originally a front-end for dc ("desk-calculator"); modern GNU bc is instead a backwards-compatible byte-code interpreter for dc, but what it stands for is still "basic calculator"

anyfoo3• 11 years ago

While a lot of the names have humorous origins, I don't see the humor in this particular entry at all? Can you explain?

sukilot• 11 years ago

Backwards Compatible

Byte Code

qu4z-2• 11 years ago

I was amused that they introduce it as a "[b]ackwards-[c]ompatible [b]yte-[c]ode interpreter". Not sure whether that's what the GP meant.

stevebmark2• 11 years ago

Some pretty interesting explanations in this list. I personally prefer to not let the developers name things, because they usually come up with very bad names (hard to pronounce, hard to google for, have overtly sexual connotations, etc). Command line utilities are a little different because there's a culture of having short names making them easier to type. But it's still very hard to google for things like "less" because it's a common word.

chrsstrm• 11 years ago

Searches for "Unix less" or "Linux less" are spot on. Even "less command line" will get you there easily. It's all about context. And of course there are always the man pages, which is usually the best place to start.

stevebmark2• 11 years ago

I personally find the man pages very dense and poorly organized. `man grep` for example is my own personal nightmare. I think the man pages should introduce a policy of simple usage examples instead of throwing 99% of information you don't care about at you at once. Something like http://bropages.org/

M2Ys4U• 11 years ago

It's one of the two hard problems in Computer Science:

1. Naming things 2. Cache invalidation 3. Off-by-one errors.

peteretep• 11 years ago

Actually th4. Concurrencyere are three - you missed:

msh• 11 years ago

How about considering that less predates search engines so easy to search for was not a consideration.

thirteenfingers• 11 years ago

Great fun. One minor nitpick - the story of "Apache Server" being originally derived from "A Patchy Server" is a long-standing myth; the name was originally intended to be a tribute to the Apache Native American peoples. The Wikipedia article on Apache (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server) includes a link to an interview with Brian Behlendorf (http://www.linux-mag.com/id/472/) where he explains how the story arose.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

Common stuff between Linux and wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside.

_ak• 11 years ago

The 90's called, they want their terrible Linux-related jokes back.

cbd19843• 11 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/19970415054031/www.apache.org/inf...

The Apache group was formed around a number of people who provided patch files that had been written for NCSA httpd 1.3. The result after combining them was A PAtCHy server.

(April 1997)

The new story is not consistent with what their website was saying not very long ago.

eroncanc• 11 years ago

For what it's worth, that description was on the site from Oct 1996 [1] to Aug 2001 [2].

1.http://web.archive.org/web/19961028123412/http://www.apache.... 2.http://web.archive.org/web/20010803130101/http://www.apache....

gaius• 11 years ago

I was using web servers at the time, and the "a patchy server" story is what everyone said back then. Nowadays people take it all for granted but Apache was radical at the time, previously people had been running httpd out of inetd.conf (!)

royce• 11 years ago

I personally attended a talk presented by Brian Behlendorf at the ISPF (an early ISP conference) in 1999 (which predates the 2000 Linux Magazine article). In his talk, he used the "A Patchy Server" explanation. He made no mention of any other etymology that I recall.

So either Brian was deliberately propagating the myth himself ... or maybe there's some retconning going on.

seccess• 11 years ago

"python - is of course a Monty Python reference"

I had no idea! Makes me love it even more.

yen2233• 11 years ago

Wait till you find out why the IDE that comes with the official Python package is called IDLE ;)

barsonme• 11 years ago

Or read through Python's docs and find the hidden Monty Python references :-)

JoshTriplett• 11 years ago

And the Python Package Index, https://pypi.python.org/pypi , is also known as the "Cheese Shop".

yen2233• 11 years ago

The name lives on in python "wheels".

pronik2• 11 years ago

I never understood why you would name a package index after something that's literally got nothing to show... I know the reasoning, but it still feels strange.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

I just find it tiresome.

Intermernet2• 11 years ago

Oh I'm sorry, is this a five minute argument, or the full half hour?

pronik2• 11 years ago

One of the ideas I liked most during the inception of Python 3000 a.k.a. python3 has been to rename python3 to blackadder. Another snake, another great british comedy.

yawaramin• 11 years ago

Another fun that appears elsewhere but really does deserve to be in this list: Debian is named after Debra and Ian Murdock (he's the founder of the project, she was his girlfriend).

coyotebush• 11 years ago

This list appears to include only software packaged in Debian, but that fact does get a mention at https://www.debian.org/intro/about#history

geofft• 11 years ago

I've always wondered how Debra feels about that today. (Especially given that so many things abbreviate Debian as "deb" or "Deb-".)

Animats• 11 years ago

"Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition."

Giving cryptic names to software works better if you have a big advertising budget. Otherwise, nobody has a clue what your package does.

AndyKelley2• 11 years ago

missing from the list is one I've always wondered about: bamfdaemon

Pxtl• 11 years ago

I assume bamf refers to x-men comics where "bamf" was the onomatopoeia for the demonic character Nightcrawler's teleportation.

cogburnd02• 11 years ago

Offtopic:

(1.) As someone who has only seen the movies, does Azazel (First Class) do "Bamf!" in the comics, too?

(2.) He's Nightcrawler's dad, right? (WP claims so)

magicalhorse• 11 years ago

bad-ass motherfker daemon?

zer0rest2• 11 years ago

+1 lol

ajdlinux• 11 years ago

According to https://launchpad.net/bamf, it's the BAMF Application Matching Framework

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

The free software movement really needs to step up its name-game. No normal people want to use a program called The GIMP.

yen2233• 11 years ago

I was one of those people who heard of the photo editor tool before I watched Pulp Fiction. I had no idea why the name was so controversial.

AndyKelley2• 11 years ago

How about "git"?

userbinator• 11 years ago

Reminds me of the BDSM-themed splash screen they put in one of the development versions a while back - which seems to have disappeared from the official site, but you can find it if you look hard enough (possibly a bit NSFW):

http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1322837600.png

vacri• 11 years ago

The iPad was mocked for sounding like a feminine hygeine product, yet it seems to have done alright for itself.

oneeyedpigeon2• 11 years ago

The difference is that normal people understand the meaning behind the name 'iPad' (Apple's use of 'i' prefix for mobile, the device is like a 'pad' of paper) whilst, to them, Gimp is just a bit ... weird and creepy.

dividuum• 11 years ago

I always liked "voice over misconfigured internet telephones" (http://vomit.xtdnet.nl/)

matt4077• 11 years ago

They happily fly on an airline named "Virgin". I think GIMP is quite ok – possibly better than the too-literal 'Photoshop'.

Now if GIMP were actually usable...

adito• 11 years ago

Is is just me that get 403 Forbidden error?

Udo• 11 years ago

Nope, I don't get what this is about, either. It's an error page that says

  Forbidden

  You are not allowed to access this!

frik2• 11 years ago

  parrot 
  (common virtual machine for dynamic languages) named 
  after an April Fool's hoax that came true:

http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm

What a coincident. In 2015, Perl 6 (Parrot VM) and Python 3 have difficulties to transfer their community over from the former major releases Perl 5 and Python 2.

Offtopic: We can learn from it. Like fixing a language early or never/only in small steps. Other examples: XHTML 1 and especially 2 failed, HTML5 based on HTML4 won spectacular. PHP6 failed, but won with PHP 5.3+ and now PHP 7. The transition from Visual Basic 6 and VBA 6 to Visual Basic .Net failed, J#/C# won.

aaronbrethorst• 11 years ago

J# definitely did not win. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Sharp#Future_of_J.23

frik2• 11 years ago

I meant Visual Basic 6 developers moved on to C# or web development, as porting VB6 code to VB.net was non trivial.

The MS Java to .Net/C# roadmap is off-topic and complicated (afaik: Sun Java -> MS Java (MSJVM) J++ -> J# & C#, C#). J# is dead as of 2015 (it was a transitional language to .Net/C#), but it cannot be denied MS got a VM based environment (CLR) and a Java-inspired language (C# v1). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)#... .

xorcist• 11 years ago

Perl 6's biggest mistake was naming their language Perl. It turns out Perl-6 is a completely different language from Perl-5, although they share the surrounding ecosystem. But now that the name is taken, Perl-5 is up to version 20.2 with no clear solution in sight to communicate version numbers in the future.

I don't think any of the Perl-6 developers actually advocates switching from Perl-5. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.) The situation is quite different from Python 3, which is the newest incarnation of the Python language.

rat87• 11 years ago

From what I've heard of it I'm guessing they would be advocating switching to Perl-6 for new projects if perl-6 had actually shipped a 1.0/6.0 type release and seemed to be succeeding as a practical language.

cbd19843• 11 years ago

The original plan, as I recall, was to move everyone to the Parrot VM, such that there would be a Perl 5 compiler, a Perl 6 compiler, a your-language-here compiler, and everyone would be able to share code in an environment that was similar to the JVM but friendlier to dynamic languages.

So Perl 5 was never going to go away like Perl 4 had, it was just going to become one element of a broader ecosystem.

vinceyuan2• 11 years ago

We all know "GNU's Not Unix." But what does G stand for?

andrey-p• 11 years ago

GNU, of course.

sah2ed• 11 years ago

GNU is a recursive acronym

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym

vinceyuan2• 11 years ago

I know it is a recursive acronym. I just want to know why they chose G, instead of A, B, C, ... etc.

gwu78• 11 years ago

mknod: "nowadays of extremely limited usefulness"

Interesting perspective. I use it almost daily.

The syscall as well as the provided utility of same name.

antientropic• 11 years ago

I have to ask: what do you do that you need to create device nodes manually on a daily basis?

nailer• 11 years ago

Another great one is 'dd' which stands for 'Copy and Convert'. Oddly enough, cc was already taken.

ivoras• 11 years ago

Wasn't "dd" always "duplicate data"?

wantab3• 11 years ago

Nope.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/what-does-dd-st...

vince_refiti• 11 years ago

What is the origin of the name Chicken Scheme?

icebraining• 11 years ago

One last question: What inspired the names CHICKEN and SPOCK? Do they mean anything, aside from the bird and the well-known Star Trek character?

That question always comes up, sooner or later. ;-)

I had a plastic toy of Feathers McGraw on my desk, the evil penguin (disguised as a chicken!) from the Wallace and Gromit movie, “The Wrong Trousers.” Looking for a preliminary working title for the compiler, I used the first thing that came to my mind that day. I’m somewhat superstitious about names for software projects, and things were progressing well, so I didn’t dare to change the name.

Also, there is the old philosophical question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? This applies to CHICKEN, too. The compiler is written in Scheme, so you need CHICKEN in order to compile CHICKEN.

http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/19/chicken-scheme-spock...

wantab3• 11 years ago

In most cases, it's not cryptic or strange at all and makes perfect sense. This article ignores history. Back then, names were shortened to save every available byte cause ram and disk usage was so limited. It was also easier to type when you did everything from the command line. In addition, a lot of these were created in some lab somewhere, like Bell Labs, and they had no intention of you using it.

Long ago, when I heard of awk and sed, the first thing I did was ask what they stood for. I would think any seriously interested computer person would do the same thing.

smorrow4• 11 years ago

When sed was new, the name wouldn't even have been considered cryptic: everybody already new ed.

Also: before sed there was gres. I'm not saying it's relevant, just that I've thought it would be better to have gres, and have it be the standard, than sed. (Match and substitution in actually-separate arguments.)

anyfoo3• 11 years ago

In most cases, it's not cryptic or strange at all and makes perfect sense.

Just because it made sense and was entirely justified right then, does not mean that it is not cryptic or strange today. That's kind of the point of the explanations: to explain why the names are so cryptic and strange.

Long ago, when I heard of awk and sed, the first thing I did was ask what they stood for. I would think any seriously interested computer person would do the same thing.

Interesting expectation. I think why I always wondered, I did not really ask that often. Firstly because when I started, there were not many places to ask for (hardly any non-students even had Internet access), second because it would get tedious after a short time.

It's entirely justified for even very serious "computer persons" to have used these commands all the time and only now learning the meaning of some of them.

wantab3• 11 years ago

It makes sense today and isn't cryptic at all. Perhaps to outsiders it is but we're not outsiders. We know it stands for something and "stream editor" should make sense. Looking it up is a matter of "man sed" or, in my case long ago, I'd turn to the guy sitting next to me and ask him.

Yes, awk is an exception, and there are others, but they aren't the rule.

smorrow4• 11 years ago

"awk - see mawk"

What.

angelortega• 11 years ago

So "ruby" is not a play on "perl"? I don't believe it.

krick• 11 years ago

Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition

God, this is so true! I seriously think that world would be much better already if we would just rename many of well-established binaries and C-functions to more-intuitive, better convention. Even without changing APIs that much (which would be great too, of course).

cbd19843• 11 years ago

Good luck with that. We can't even give the creat() system call an 'e' at the end.

(Not that it should be used much these days; the 'creat() then open()' idiom is a race condition waiting to happen, so 'open()' has grown the ability to create-and-open in one atomic operation. That seems to handle most of the file creation that Unix programs need to do.)

smorrow4• 11 years ago

creat was always create-and-open.

cafard• 11 years ago

I believe that the US Navy used to use Jovial: Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language.

Rudism• 11 years ago

One of my favorites from the Windows world is fart.exe (Find And Replace Text).

Why the name?

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