Naming of Parts [Was: Re: Hashtable ordering]
Mike Schilling wrote:
Lew wrote:
Dave Searles wrote:
Eric Sosman wrote:
Dave Searles wrote:
"ISAM" files?
It's an acronym: Igoogle Sit Afor Myourself.
You've missed the point, which was that Roedy failed to communicate
clearly by not expanding its first use in his post.
It's a standard acronym and Roedy naturally assumed that most people
here would be familiar with it.
People for whom COBOL and mainframes are mythical beasts from bygone ages
might well not have heard of it. You're showing your age, Lew :-)
Don't you mean "COmmon Business-Oriented Language (COBOL)?"
I've wondered, idly, when descriptive names went out of
fashion in the software industry. When I started, the languages
were named FORmula TRANslator and ALGOrithmic Language and
LISt Processor and so on, acronyms that were sometimes contrived
but eventually got down to a descriptive phrase. And software
carried labels like Scientific Subroutine Package or Bill Of
Materials Processor (when disks got big enough and cheap enough
to displace magnetic tape, BOMP was replaced by DBOMP) -- again,
the name or acronym had some kind of meaning at its foundation.
But one day when I wasn't watching closely, descriptive names
died out like asteroid-smitten dinosaurs. Nowadays we swim in a
sea of names altogether lacking in descriptive power, cute names
but arbitrary. Programming languages are named Caffeine and
Boa and Achilles, applications are called Blunderbird and SeaFlunky
and Sioux -- and we're left to memorize a swarm of arbitrary
associations, each of us maintaining a Map<String,Thing> without
benefit of any kind of systematic arrangement.
All right, I'm overstating things a bit: We've got Windows,
PERL, HTML, and so on, each with a germ of meaning somewhere in
its history. But it does seem that today's ways of naming things
are not intended to aid communication, but to create "tests" that
separate the initiates from the unwashed. The goal seems not to
be to choose a name that informs, but a name that is catchy and
inspires a logo that's equally uninformative but cute as Hell.
--
Eric Sosman
esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid