this girl drives a tank

whats in a name?

Although the word `weasel' is generally associated with the beadiest of beady eyed mammals, it also has a human context. I work with a weasel, we were on a break once sitting around a picnic table, talking about work, and I mentioned something about how our department processes requests from our RF engineers and how much of a waste of time it was and mentioned an idea I had been harbouring to speed up the process.

Later that day at one of our snooze-fest meetings, this guy (who was at the picnic table with us) pipes up with my exact same idea, and got a couple of "good idea!!"'s from our bosses. I just looked over at him and thought what a lamer he was.

I bring this up because my friend mentioned in IRC what a silly name IceWeasel is to choose for a web browser. I tend to agree, although I can offer no suitable alternative at the moment.

It is interesting to me how software projects are named. I admit I haven't done much research but it seems the older projects primarily lean toward cramming as much information into their name so one is left with no doubt as to what the application actually does.

A great example of this is course EMACS, which was first developed as a series of macros for TECO, a 1960ish Text Editor and Corrector, giving us Editor MACrosS.

Ballistic Research Laboratory's Computer Aided Design, or BRLCAD is another fine example of this naming technique. I sense that in both these cases the name was perhaps an afterthought and the software was the real star of the show.

Today it seems there are a few camps when it comes to naming software. One is the strictly-informative, Linux has tons of these, dvdbackup, xscreensaver, imagemagick, tcpdump, , mp3info, subtitleripper, cdrecord... and so on.. The kind of app you can tell quite a lot about just from its name.

Then there is cutesy-informative, like sound-juicer, acid-rip, cute-ftp, pipermail, ubuntu-linux..., these kinds of names still convey the gist of what the application does but retains some creative license at the same time.

Finally there is the cutsie-cutsie named apps. Some examples of these would be clementine, beagle, istanbul, k3b, nexuiz, hydrogen, byzanz, firefox... These apps you would likely have to google if you really wanted to know what they did.

So why is IceWeasel a bad name? Well, lets face it, nobody likes a weasel, nobody. And an ice weasel sounds even worse, I wager even regular weasels don't like Ice Weasels. Of course we all hated the name `Firefox' when it first came out, (admit it) but we got used to it. Maybe in a few years IceWeasel will be as acceptable as Firefox is now.