SMRTR ProgrammingDec 11, 2025Lobsters

Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

SMRTR summary

Richard Stallman's 2022 EmacsConf talk highlighted the problem of meaningless software naming. Modern development has abandoned descriptive conventions like grep and sed for random nouns and mythological creatures. This creates cognitive overhead as developers must constantly decode arbitrary names instead of focusing on architecture and problem-solving, unlike other engineering fields that maintain clear nomenclature.

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