From: James Britt Date: 2006-07-22T00:52:00+09:00 Subject: Re: An open letter to Rubyists - Naming things Jeff Pritchard wrote: > Is it just me, or do other Rubyists find it difficult to remember what a > whimsically named module or plug-in was called that they saw on this or > some other forum just last week. I've only been into Ruby for a few > months now, and in that time I've seen probably a hundred announcements > for cool new code that I can drop into my projects to do cool new things > that otherwise would not have been worth the trouble... > > ...I've also, a few hundred times, seen an announcement a few days or > weeks later announcing the next version of something I've heard of > before, and had absolutely no faintest recollection of what said module > or plugin does. > > Just to name a few in no particular order: > Juggernaut, Capistrano, ferret, Mongoose, Curses, RMajic, Selenium, > BlueCloth, ozimodo, Mechanize,Korundum, Nitro, Mongrel > > You get the idea. How is one supposed to remember these names long > enough to find a use for said jewel and become more familiar with it. > Instead, one finds a use for something he's seen before and finds it > nearly impossible to find the module again due to the cleverly disguised > name chosen by it's author. > Phil Karlton said, "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." People tend to pick names that connote some feature or aspect while not colliding with the names of other projects. Calling a Web application framework "Ruby Web Application Framework" instead of "Nitro" may be descriptive, but there's more than one such framework. So who gets the name? Many of these apps and libs are on rubyforge.org, reducing the search space. I also find that a Google search on the name, plus the word "Ruby" will get me what I want. If I don't remember the actual name, then I search on "Ruby" plus some keywords. -- James Britt "Blanket statements are over-rated"