Re: Names are not descriptions; descriptions are not names

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:

> On 5/11/2023 9:01 PM, Adam Porter wrote:
>> And by burdening the name with a responsibility it cannot bear, the
>> name suffers, the package suffers, and ultimately, the user suffers.
>> The "descriptive" name is not memorable; the user likely forgets what
>> it's called a few weeks after installing and configuring it...
>
> Probably my favorite project name in existence is "pacman", Arch's
> package manager. If I didn't know about it and you asked me to guess
> what it did, I'm sure I'd say, "It lets you play Pac-man," but once I
> know it's a package manager, the name makes perfect sense and I can
> easily remember it.

That name is descriptive, but unique enough to latch onto memory.

And you can discover it if you remember "something about packages", so
you type pac<TAB><TAB> on the shell.

> When I'm looking for a package on ELPA (or built into Emacs) to do
> XYZ, I don't generally consult the name at all, and instead
> read/search the description or the manual. About the only time I look
> at the name is if I'm searching for a major mode of a programming
> language, which is almost always "lang-mode".

I fulltext-search the package listing.

    M-x package-list-packages C-s <whatever> C-s (repeat)

I don’t have time to read all the one-line descriptions.

And I like having somewhat descriptive names.

Try to remember how to open a PDF on the command-line. Gnome: evince —
it took me months to remember that. KDE: kpdf. It once was. Now it’s
okular. That’s still somewhat evocative of seeing something, so better
than evince, but I preferred kpdf. And for kwrite it is obvious what it
does. Same for gedit — I never forgot gedit, even though I use it
rarely. If I’m not yet fully awake in the morning when I get up to make
the lunchboxes for the kids, I can still remember gedit. I can also
remember icecat, because that’s like firefox. And lftp still works. But
audacity I have to search when I didn’t use it for a while. Same for
clementine and even worse "whatever is the default image viewer" (no, I
really don’t know; doesn’t help that the name is not in the program
listing ...) — and don’t ask me to remember xdg-open or M-x
browse-url-xdg-open — it always takes me several tries to remember the
correct command, and that’s with ido-completion in the commands.

Or worse: the advanced video-editor that’s not kdenlive.

Though naming with something else than the most obvious description
becomes important once there is more than one package for the same task.

I often use amx to search for something: M-x org-<something I want to do>

And all in all there’s an old truth: naming is hard. While a fixed rule
like "name not description not name" can help to avoid the trap of
thinking that the name *must* be a description, I think it is too
simplistic to steer the process of finding a good name.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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