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

[Tim Cross]

Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> 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!".
>
> I was like that, when I had first heard of both "auto-complete-mode" and
> "company-mode" I preferred the former because the name was more
> descriptive, and "company-mode" made the impression of being
> "commercial" software.  In the end I switched because it was technically
> superior, but I hesitated for a long while no other reason than the
> name.
>
> While it might be that many don't care about names, it is unreasonable
> to assume that nobody prefers generic, descriptive names.

So, suddenly, because I disagree with the necessity to change the name
of eglot, I suddenly don't care about names or assume nobody prefers
generic, descriptive names? That is just nonsense. It is the fact I care
about the name I've been involved in this discussion. 

I've lost count of how many times I've said this.

I'm not against descriptive names. What I'm against is the requirement
for a descriptive name to take precedence over all other important
attributes of a good name.

I would also suggest, based on your experience with company mode, that
you put too much weight in the meaning of a name. The old saying about
never judging a book by its cover seems somewhat relevant here. Most
people don't select packages (either in Emacs or anywhere else) based
just on the name. They fact you didn't look at the description of
company mode and judged it solely based on the name is really a failure
in your process, not in the package name.

Out of interest, given the name 'auto-complete' was already taken, what
would have been your preferred name for 'company'? 

In this age of internet data and internet searching, I would suggest
that uniqueness of a name is actually far more important than the
descriptive attributes of the name. When your lucky enough to be able to
have both a descriptive and unique name, fantastic. However, the name
being descriptive should not be a requirement.

At the end of the day, the reason this debate is going on and on is
because nobody who is pushing for a name change has come up with a
single suggestion which adds more value than it destroys. RMS has
suggested Parse Code, which I think is one of the worse suggestions so
far - it is inaccurate and misleading, will make searching for help and
problem solutions much harder, will likely cause confusion in
communications, is longer and attempts to 'own' the name of a generic
process which many other packages implement. In fact, if I was searching
for a code parser, I would be frustrated by that package showing up as
it doesn't do what it says on the box. When I search for a code parser,
I want something which will parse my code so that I can then do
something with that parsed/toeknised result, I'm not interested in a
client for LSP servers.