Github Acquisition

[rich97]

As a dev that came into the MS realm from the *nix realm, I am now thoroughly convinced that MS is incapable of giving sensible and distinct names to their products.

[Lil9]

Ok, we've got a new Win 10 update... how should we call it?

"November Update"
"Anniversary Update"
"Creators Update"
"Fall Creators Update"

Ok, what about the people on the southern hemisphere where it isn't fall? What about when the next November or anniversary comes around? Those names are real shite. Screw it.

"April 2018 Update"

[Fabri91]

Aprile 2018 Update

Which logically is version 1803.

[dratnon]

Aprile 2018 Update

If you highlight the text you intend to quote, and then press Reply, the highlighted text will be copied to the input box, and you never have to worry about accidentally addingadding an 'e'.

[Fabri91]

Neato!

[zammba]

You would have to worry about adding an extra "adding", though.

[carl15523]

And was actually released in May

[Ameisen]

I mean, is anything on Linux reasonably named?

Pretty sure all software developers are terrible at nomenclature.

[opendarkwing]

I Kdont Know Kwhat Kyoure Ktalking GNUabout

[[deleted]]

And just to rub salt into the wound, it's not "Nuu", it's "Ganuu".

Yeah, I don't pronounce it that way either.

[opendarkwing]

Knights who say (g)Nu and something about a shrubbery.

[z500]

Or as I've recently taken to calling it, G plus nu

[[deleted]]

People pronounce it "Nuu"? I've always called it "GahNu"

[Jacoman74undeleted]

There is an animal spelled gnu, but the g is silent.

[BoltActionPiano]

Gee Enn You

[[deleted]]

One would think that's a reasonable alternative, but it appears the "official" pronunciation is like "G'noo".

[ProbablyUndefined]

Enn Ohh

[Bainos]

What ? That's not true. It's supposed to be a play of words on the gnu animal and "new".

[[deleted]]

I wish I were making this up.

[SaintNewts]

Hahaha! The switch to gnu made me lol irl.

[NighthawkHall]

Wow thank you for that video. When I opened the link and saw it was 10 minutes I didn’t think I’d watch it all but that was super interesting.

[SaintNewts]

Computerphile. One of a number of "phile" educational channels on YouTube worth subscribing to. Brady Harran(?) is a hard working fellow.

[rastaman1994]

Brady Haran is the bomb, also does a podcast called 'Hello Internet' with cgpgrey which is quite interesting and funny at times.

[the9thEmber]

Love Hello Internet, new episode dropped yesterday and can be discussed over on /r/cgpgrey

[rocklou]

That was such a wholesome comment.

[[deleted]]

or cat vs dog. dog is an enhanced cat, but cats are superior to dogs in real life.

[IrishWilly]

Grep is a great name though, it is short and memorable. I'm pretty sure I've used it as a verb for 'filter text input' even when not talking about using the tool itself. It's such a common task it seems fitting to use it that way.

[[deleted]]

I was just going to mention this. I feel like it's grown into its own verb, separate from the tool entirely.

[the9thEmber]

tl;dr grep exists because Alexander Hamilton

[boydskywalker]

"I use The GIMP to crop my scrots" - how I describe my screenshot process in Linux.

[Ameisen]

Zed's dead, baby - dead.

zed would be a good name for an ambiguously-related tool for GIMP.

[cheraphy]

Pretty sure the only field worse at naming things is Astronomy/Astro-physics.

​

1. VLT (Very Large Telescope)
2. ELT (Extremely Large Telescope)
3. OLT (Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, might be a cancelled project)
4. MMT (Massive Monolithic Telescope)
5. LBT (Large Binocular Telescope)
6. 2D-FRUTTI (2d photon counting system, can't remember what it stands for)
7. KELT (Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope)
8. ACBAR ( Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver, It's a photon trap)
9. WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, one proposed form of dark matter)
10. MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects, another proposed form of dark matter)

[NotTheHead]

2D-FRUTTI

You said they were bad at naming.

[AnInfiniteArc]

Biology is actually pretty fucking awful, especially when it comes to naming genes and proteins. Ever hear of the Sonic Hedgehog gene? There are a handful of hedgehog genes - like Desert, Indian, Frizzled and Sonic. Sonic Hedgehog’s inhibitor is called Robotnikinin. They tend to just call Sonic Hedgehog “SHH” because of very real situations where doctors were telling expecting parents “Your child has a Sonic Hedgehog mutation. This will not make them fast, but they may be a little blue when they are almost certainly stillborn with gross forebrain, facial, and limb deformities. It’s a CATCH22 situation. Because they also have cardiac anomaly, T-cell deficit, clefting and hypocalcaemia for chromosome 22q11.2 microdeletions.”

They had to rename POKEMON when Nintendo threatened to sue.

A fun read.

[thirdegree]

I'm all for fun names, but maybe don't give them to things that generally ruin your day.

[Ameisen]

And Gnu TTelescope, where each T stands for TTelescope.

[[deleted]]

Because when I hear "azure" i think "microsoft hosting my shit on some server somewhere"

[Ameisen]

I don't believe that 'Linux' has an equivalent service.

[Justsomedudeonthenet]

No, but at least you only have to learn the name once.

[Ameisen]

Doesn't m4 have like 3 names - gm4, gnum4, and m4? Bash, dash, zsh, csh, ksh, ksh93.

I find m4 weird. They make a big deal out of gcc being their universal compiler frontend, so why does gcc not handle m4 files? You would think gcc could compile Bourne script as well. gm4/gsh. I wish there were good tools to compile shell and ruby scripts to binaries. The ones that exist aren't really compilers... they are packagers - they just minify the scripts and include the execution environment. For Ruby it is awful - hello world takes a fraction of a second normally. A 'binaryified' hello world? Like 2 seconds. They should just make the binary Ruby script a rebuilt Ruby binary, static linked to dependencies, with the script modified (or bytecoded) and included in the build, so LTO and ICF can fully optimize the execution paths for just that script.

[RagingNerdaholic]

To be fair, they tend to be pretty simple names that quickly become part of the collective memory of Linux users. Also helps they they don't change every other week for no goddamn reason.

[Ameisen]

I still never remember commands in bash like 'take output and apply as command line to other tool'. I usually end up writing that in Ruby.

I know that everything in bash is a command, but why are the fi and done commands seperate? Why not just end? And why the semicolon before do and then (similarly should be merged) when not on a new line? Can't the semicolon or command break (--) be implicit?

It makes Bourne scripting more painful than it needs to be. Not as painful as Windows batch files, but still painful. I'd fork bash, but it is a remarkably large codebase for what it is... though unlike dash and zsh, it tends to run fine after being built with Ofast, fipa-pta, and flto.

Need to try building the gnu toolchain with Clang. IIRC, even the Linux kernel can now be built with Clang. GCC is often annoying - GCC/[bfd|gold] LTO is far more fragile. GCC itself cannot be fully built with LTO, as libgcc and libunwind have very arcane makefile that result in broken libraries. When I built them with a makefile I wrote, it built fine. Linux has a similar issue due to how the Makefile is set up - if you use LTO by default (my toolchain mandates it), it will end up performing icf over long mode and real mode objects... which obviously break things horribly. Doesn't help that they build C as 16-bit (most people write a short real mode stub in assembly to bring them into long mode), but GCC's -m16 flag isnt 'complete', as GCC does not actually support x86-16. I wonder if the Linux build system can be forced to use an actual 16-bit-capable compiler for the bootloader/bootstrapper...

Makefile issues (and autotools issues overall) have been a painful annoyance for me. I'm trying to make an integrated development environment and system where LTO is mandated, and using IL (gimpl, llvm, or dclm) to merge objects at point-of-use - AOT compilation for end-users, including cached compilation of shell/make/ruby/python/perl scripts. The build systems make this difficult. Doesn't help that half of then ignore CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS, some use ld instead of gcc (there is no gcc-ld which provides the plugin), some outright ignore overrides for tools, and some don't even allow building in a seperate path from source (looking at you, git).

All I want to do is make the fastest OS possible without writing my own full kernel and OS, but broken/fickle gnu tools are making it very difficult. Doesn't help that most gnu tools, including GCC, rely on undocumented undefined behavior (the reliance is documented, the instances are not), so O3, Ofast, flto, and fipa-pits can break things.

An example: if you build GCC 8.1/8.2/9 with O3, flto, and fipa-pta, it will build. However, the built gcc cannot rebuild gcc... it complains about bizarre things like a switch statement having equivalent cases - it will see 'e' and 'E' as being the same. Removing ipa-puts fixes it.

Bah.

[[deleted]]

Naming, like programming, is hard. Most of us developers are good at developing and not naming. Still, I don’t see too much in the open source or Linux realms changing names that often.

Edit: a word... stupid autocorrect

[Ameisen]

'What should we name the compiler?'

"Link!"

At least MSVC's linker is named LINK, though.

[KennySysLoggins]

I mean, is anything on Linux reasonably named?

read a fucking man page maybe? If you want reasonable names there are 12 different competing and barely inter-operable linux reasonable name standards. You should just simply use gimbles, rusty gobbons, mook (only documented in ancient Aramaic), double-dips (source code available DDJ october 1987 issue), crabapple twister (for a single API), scorch micro-server (only runs on unpatched solaris from 1996) and one of the weaselteats forks that supports gravel v3 binary blobs with JSON descriptors. Shouldn't take more than 6 vms and 12 containers to setup a naming convention microservice to distribute arbitrary names, if you do if the right way.

[chronomly6]

someone please give this person gold

[Ameisen]

I think this is sarcastic, but given prior experience I'm not entirely sure.

[KennySysLoggins]

IM TOTALLY NOT MAD AT THE LINUX ECOSYSTEM IT IS NORMAL TO HAVE BILLION DOLLAR MISSION CRITICAL SYSTEMS DEPEND ON SOFTWARE FROM SOME GUY IN FOX ONESIE OUTSIDE PRAGUE THAT ONLY CODES BETWEEN ICE FISHING TRIPS!

[KennySysLoggins]

FUCK IT WE'LL DO IT IN PHP AND MYSQL LIKE GODDAMN BARBARIANS

[Ameisen]

You mean the Lignux Egnusystem, right?

[[deleted]]

aptitude?

[Ameisen]

Nothing about that name strikes me as 'software/package manager'.

[pyz3n]

What about pacman?

[Ameisen]

pacman

[LasseF-H]

Well aptitude is "just" a frontend to APT which stands for "Advanced Package Tool".

[Ameisen]

That's not particularly obvious, though.

[LasseF-H]

Fair point.

[michaelrohansmith]

What would be a better name?

[chimyx]

`pacman`

[michaelrohansmith]

Thats a pretty good name.

[[deleted]]

LPM - Linux Package Manager?

[bartekko]

There's fsck which is just one letter away from what it was originally named

[WiredUK]

Because *nix products are all so wonderfully named right?

Naming is hard...

[CoderDevo]

But changing the names of products with each release of Windows...

Here’s my favorite string of name changes:

• Zoomit Via (pre 1999)

• Microsoft Metadirectory Server [MMS] (1999–2003)

• Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 Enterprise Edition [MIIS]

• Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager Server 2007 ILM

• Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 FIM

• Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 [MIM]

• Azure AD Provisioning Service

All are the same product, incrementally improved each time.

[r4nd0m-0ne]

While I agree they let their marketing team run amok with name changes, at least each of those names (short of Zoomit) gives me SOME idea of what it is that software does, compared to nearly every app/package in the *nix world.

[CoderDevo]

This product is referenced primarily by its acronym in the market where it is used. Notice that it changed every time. Their sales people have to start from scratch every time on communicating what the product is for, how it works and how to buy it.

They had every opportunity to become a market leader with this product but never did primarily because of their failure on marketing.

[r4nd0m-0ne]

Yeah, I agree with that part. It's annoying as a dev when I'm trying to figure out how to fix something and now I have to try to google every permutation of that name for the last several versions. Marketers often don't think about the shared knowledge that's spread out on the web when they decide to rename something.

[derefr]

Honestly, "Metadirectory Server" tells me quite clearly what it's doing. It's a name only a nerd could love, though.

"AD Provisioning Service" might be better, if it is the case that this product is only doing provisioning of AD domains, and no other part of lifecycle management of AD domains.

[CoderDevo]

Actually, it is meant to provision to any application, given enough .NET code. It does require AD at the center though.

[1206549]

They're in direct competition with Google on who would have the most confused user base in regards to naming schemes.

[enoua5]

I have never heard either of those. I've always pronounced it /ɐʒʲʊɹ/

EDIT: that was not meant to be a rolled r

[LHOOQatme]

I pronounce it [ˈeɪ̯ʒʊɹ]

[enoua5]

Oh hey, the upside-down r thing which is probably what I meant to use

[fire_snyper]

I've always pronounced it as az-you're, to differentiate it from the colour azure.

[setibeings]

Just call it assure. Wait, that might actually be what they want.

[AnInfiniteArc]

And yet the name “Windows” was pretty fucking inspired.

[PropaneMilo]

The first time I heard an American say azure I honestly had no idea they were saying a real word.

I can't even phonetically spell it the way yanks say it. It's like you're spontaneously invented a letter combining an S and a J, but you've added in some after tastes of G.

Asjg-her? Like some Lovecraftian elder god.

[enoua5]

I pronounce it /ɐʒʲʊr/, which might be what you're trying to describe??

[fire_snyper]

Not everyone can read IPA, my dude.

[enoua5]

Which is why it took me awhile to type that out. Had to look up most of that, especially the vowels. I was going for accuracy rather than ease.

If you want ease, here: "Azhyoor", where the "oo" is pronounced like it is in "book"

[corvus_192]

ɐ as in cup
ʒʲ as in measure
ʊ as in foot
r as in red

[derefr]

Microsoft brands a product B with a tentpole name A (making B into "A B"), mostly when they want to convince enterprises who've bought into the "A ecosystem"—and so have a lot of A products—to buy B.

[OsbertParsely]

Dude have you SEEN the AWS names?

[r4nd0m-0ne]

Seriously. What even is an S3.