I thought IUPAC exists precisely because of this problem, before it chemists named stuff any old random shit, many of which are still with us today, Formaldehyde, acetone, chloroform, aniline and many many more.

It’s also very focused on the consumption of the code. What about the people pouring their lives into this code. Anything that helps people stay motivated or inspire people to contribute is a huge boon. It also ignores the fact that if everyone names a tool by it’s function then Apache, Tomcat, Nginx and dozens of other project are now all called “http-server”. Or Apache-www, Tomcat-www, Nginx-www.

I dunno. Know your environment I guess, is it that hard?

Anyway. If they are so confident in this approach fork a few projects rename them and get the community to jump ship shouldn’t be hard if this is such an easy win.

Should be no problem getting an established community to switch from “aspirin” to “acetylsalicylic acid”.

It’s an interesting article, but I don’t think I’m sold on it.

Its pretty hard to come up with a unique name these days. For the most part I’m ok with whatever the developer likes. Lately switched my code from ‘serialport’ to ‘serialport-rs’. Takes a bit of cognitive effort to keep those separated, a downside of similar names. And if you want to find a lib like http-server, how are you going to search for it?

Maybe a better way to go is with functional naming but with author attribution. So google/http-server or joebobs/http-server. In rust, unfortunately packages don’t have author attached so unique names are necessary.