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id, aliases, title, tags, dg-publish, daily, yearly
| id | aliases | title | tags | dg-publish | daily | yearly | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-12-17T12:32:00 | 2025-12-17 12:32:?? |
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true | 2025-12-17 | 2025 |
2025-12-17 12:32:??
A while ago I heard a minor coding influencer lament that frameworks, packages, and tools often have ridiculous sounding names1 when, he suggests, they ought to just be called what they do.
Unfortunately some people and organizations agree with him, giving us terms which mean both something very general and something very specific.2
For lack of a better term I've been thinking of this as an SEO problem, but the bigger problem is that it invites category-mistake, whereby the ignorant listener associates traits unique to the example to all things that the name could describe.
I thought to finally write about this problem while researching lighting-controls#Protocols. The two most dominant examples:
while notably different in topology, could both be described accurately with the other's name.
It is possible to avoid this problem without the effort necessary to come up with a clever name. Just stick an arbitrary, but reasonably unique word in front of the generic description. A person's name ("John's Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (JDALI)") or your favorite animal ("Heron Digital Multiplex (HDMX)") are good options.
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bubble-teaandratatui(libraries for creating CLI's) come to my mind ↩︎ -
project-management-tm was my go to example, but weak because it's difficult for me to articulate the difference from construction project management especially to someone unfamiliar with the specifics of either. ↩︎