Re: Renaming eglot -- or at least add an alias?

[Tim Cross]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > If the name doesn't make it
>   > clear what it does, the same is true for Emacs, Company, GNU, GCC, Linux
>   > (the kernel).
>
> GCC is an acronym for GNU Compiler Collection; that states what it
> does.
>
> GNU is an acronym for GNU's Not Unix.  By the convention for recursive
> acronyms, that implies something similar to Unix; in other words, a
> Unix-like operating system.
>
> Emacs is short for Editing Macros, which says it is an editor.
>
> That is not to say that none of those could possibly be improved upon.
>
> Company, by contrast, is one of the unclear names I think we should
> change for clarity.
>
> As for Linux, that name is not ours, so the blame or the praise
> is not for us.

Now things are just getting ridiculous. Your original requirement was
for a name free of jargon and non-technical. GCC, GNU and Emacs hardly
meet those requirements. The name eglot seems as appropriate given it
stands for Emacs polyglot and essentially that is what it does - it
makes Emacs able to 'know' and work with many languages. The definition
of polyglot is "a person who knows and is able to use several
languages". This is as close to any other proposed description for what
it does. By enabling eglot, you can enable Emacs to better work/use
many languages by adding language specific linting, code snippets,
refactoring, documentation, completion and navigation to definitions and
references etc without also having to install additional language
specific packages. 

However, the real benefit of the name is that it is short, unique and
easy to type and great for use in searches. Just try a little
experiment, type eglot into a browser search box and look at what you
have. Now type any of the alternative names proposed and see what you
get. The results make it pretty clear which was the better term to
search for. 

Then you suggest we should change the name of company mode, a mode which
has been extremely successful and over the many years it has existed,
I've never seen a single person say anything like "Oh wow, I just
discovered what company is, if only it had a better name which would
have alerted me sooner!".

If anything, the success of company (and even GNU Linux) demonstrates
the weakness of your argument regarding the importance of clear
names. You are emphasising just one aspect of a name and ignoring the
other important attributes of a name (like uniqueness, memorable,
short). Adding in company now just makes all of this seem like
bureaucratic busy work which, after all the dust has settled, will have
achieved little or made things worse.