Naming Conventions
In which the author tearfully confesses a series of abysmal research project naming conventions, and realizes he has managed nearly all of them in his dissertation work:
Updated to correct date typo
- Encyclopedia Brown That is, a project is named after clever-if-obscure reference. Thus, for example, my dissertation's infrastructure is named "Soylent" (because it's made out of people). Those who get it may or may not enjoy the extra layer of reference to the server name for this blog (DrZaius).
- BicapitalizedNaming Remember when everything was about MungedTogether names? I need not actually name names, but I will admit that my dissertation's first-ever application is called "TellMeAbout."
- SUI2C (Silly Unpronouncable Initials To Confuse). GNU may not be Unix, and YACC may be yet another compiler compiler, but "Bison" is an obscure reference (see above). "EE4P" is Enhanced Email for People; after a team of undergrads had played with the system enough, it stuck.
- MASIT (Meaningless Acronyms Spell Irrelevant Terms). I once was involved in a project named EUPHORIA (End User Production of grapHical interfaces fOr Really Interactive distributed Applications). I'm now on an open source project, JUNG, the "Java Unified Network/Graph infrastructure". The title--containing a vague reference to a pychologist--is awfully hard to find in a Google search.
I think that's my own list of sins--how's your naming convention doing?
Update Auros reminds me of one important additional type:
- Strawberry2Blueberry As far as I can tell, most software spends most of its time converting one thing to another: a graph to a list, unicode to ascii, Java to Fortran, whatever. While I'm fairly sure that I haven't committed that particular sin much, it's certainly still with us in all sorts of code.
July 16, 2004 09:33 AM
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