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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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On the importance of names 9 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Several years ago I assembled what I thought were the cool sounding names from the set of all Crayola colors, and these are what I use for larger-project codenames. Still, within that set I try to obey the old hacker traditions in naming: multiple levels of meaning, and whenever possible, really horrific puns.

    • I've recently decided to name all my machines after the fight "sounds" (onomatopoeia) superimposed on the fight scenes of the old Batman [geocities.com] serial.

      And now I own:

      • splatt (the firewall)
      • klonk (the old laptop)
      • zowie (the machine hosted by an ISP)

      I can't wait to get new machines to name! ;-) I might even rename machines named after another scheme...

      Here's a page that list them all [usfamily.net]. And here's a oneliner to fetch those names:

      links -dump http://www.usfamily.net/web/wpattinson/otr/batman/batfight.htm
      | grep -E

      • I've recently decided to name all my machines after the fight "sounds" (onomatopoeia) superimposed on the fight scenes of the old Batman serial.

        Very cool. I spent an hour or so trying to think of a naming scheme for our computers at work. I ended up using hobbit names for Macs and orc names for the Wintel boxes. :-) IIRC, frodo was the most common host name in a survey done a few years ago.
      • All our boxes were named /^flr[1-6]$/, and I demanded that the sysadmin come up with something new going forward. He's a sports guy, so I said "all sports names, please." So now we have blitz, divot, dinger and pigskin.
        --

        --
        xoa

  • I have to say I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, I see projects like Apache, and for that matter Perl, which have catchy names that don't aim to be descriptive and it's worked well for them. On the other hand if someone was looking for say an OO to RDBMS mapping framework they'd be far more likely to stumble across Class::DBI than Alzabo. I'm not suggesting the CPAN namespace hierarchy is as good as we can get, but there's certainly plenty of value in it.

    • Have you ever tried finding a Ruby library to do X? This convention of cute and clever (rather than obvious) names seems much more common on the RAA, and it causes nothing but pain.
  • when they named Ponie? :)

  • I'm real big on naming, too. Although I'm not often in a position to name a project or product, I obsess over the name of each report or program I write at work and over the names of variables in my programs. Why? Because when the thing you are working with is ineffable, you often have a vaguer idea than you should about what it is. If you think long and hard about what it is and name it so, you'll usually have a clearer idea of what you're doing. I've seen enough counterexamples in my own and other pe

    --
    J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • I was asked to work on a new project. When I got the specs I said "hey, this looks a lot like Apache with special configurations, I don't want to rewrite Apache, and a few Apache modules, with Perl since there's.. well, Apache. Let's just use Apache!" But no, I was to forge on. Then, every week new specs/features came to me. I always said "Hey, this is also in Apache.. I keep rewriting more and more of a wheel which is already very round. Let's just use Apache!" Anyways... I named it CrApache. Not because t
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