Skip to content

Comment on Naming Things

Comments

So. Many. Bad. Names.

The whole Travis/Jenkins/Hudson thing baffles me. Yes, they're all butlers. I can never remember which one is which. And since I'm English, butlers represent the worst of the old, deferential world, the world I spend half my life fighting against... and that's precisely why IMHO they're unsuitable names for anything open-source.

"therubyracer". It's something to do with Ruby. It's presumably quite fast. This isn't telling me much.

But then, I've released a fair amount of shockingly badly named stuff myself, so I should stop here. Other than to improve on the quote that begins TFA:

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."

I get why Jenkins kept the butler theme, seeing as it was a fork of Hudson by some of the main developers. But yeah, it can cause confusion.

"therubyracer" is a pun; if you know that it is a wrapper around "V8", which can refer to a car engine, it is easy enough to remember.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.