
Why the name? - xai3luGi
https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName
======
thirteenfingers
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server))
includes a link to an interview with Brian Behlendorf ([http://www.linux-
mag.com/id/472/](http://www.linux-mag.com/id/472/)) where he explains how the
story arose.

~~~
cbd1984
[http://web.archive.org/web/19970415054031/www.apache.org/inf...](http://web.archive.org/web/19970415054031/www.apache.org/info.html)

> 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
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....](http://web.archive.org/web/19961028123412/http://www.apache.org/info.html)
2.[http://web.archive.org/web/20010803130101/http://www.apache....](http://web.archive.org/web/20010803130101/http://www.apache.org/info.html)

------
yawaramin
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
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](https://www.debian.org/intro/about#history)

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

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

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Like they understand the meaning behind Microsoft Excel. Names are names,
arbitrary tokens. People get used to them.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
"'Excel' means to be good at something. A 'gimp' is some weird sexual bondage
thing" \- this is how most people in the real world think and, whether or not
they might get used to names over time and disassociate them from their
original meaning, it doesn't change their first impression.

~~~
phamilton
I never had that definition for Gimp. To me it had always meant someone with a
minor injury or handicap. Eg "my gimp leg is acting up again"

~~~
jebblue
That's what it always meant to me, never knew it had any other meaning.

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

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

~~~
wantab
Nope.

[http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/what-does-dd-
st...](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/what-does-dd-stand-
for/6835#6835)

------
Animats
_" 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.

------
seccess
"python - is of course a Monty Python reference"

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

~~~
JoshTriplett
And the Python Package Index,
[https://pypi.python.org/pypi](https://pypi.python.org/pypi) , is also known
as the "Cheese Shop".

~~~
pronik
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.

------
cardamomo
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"

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

~~~
qu4z-2
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.

~~~
anyfoo
Ouch, didn't notice. Thanks.

------
stevebmark
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.

~~~
M2Ys4U
It's one of the two hard problems in Computer Science:

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

~~~
peteretep
Actually th4. Concurrencyere are three - you missed:

~~~
Intermernet
4: Concurrenc4: Conc4u:r ryConenccuyrrencyy

    
    
        #include <sched.h>
        
        cpu_set_t  mask;
        CPU_ZERO(&mask);
        CPU_SET(0, &mask);
        result = sched_setaffinity(0, sizeof(mask), &mask);
    

4: Concurrency

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

------
krick
> 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).

~~~
cbd1984
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.)

~~~
smorrow
creat was always create-and-open.

------
adito
Is is just me that get 403 Forbidden error?

~~~
Udo
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!

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

------
gwu78
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
I have to ask: what do you do that you need to create device nodes manually on
a daily basis?

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

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

~~~
sah2ed
GNU is a recursive acronym

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym)

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

~~~
ewzimm
Stallman liked GNU because it's unpronounceable. When Europeans first
discovered the animal, Africans referred to the first sound in its name as a
click, which the Europeans didn't use in their languages, so the "g" in the
word essentially stands for "unpronounceable sound," and is usually omitted.
He used it for fun but brought back the sound in the form of a hard "g."

------
vince_refiti
What is the origin of the name Chicken Scheme?

~~~
icebraining
_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...](http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/19/chicken-scheme-spock-
part-2/)

------
smorrow
"awk - see mawk"

What.

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

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

~~~
cogburnd02
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)

------
frik

      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](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.

~~~
xorcist
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
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.

------
wantab
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.

~~~
anyfoo
_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.

~~~
wantab
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.

