• tal@lemmy.today
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      8 months ago

      Web browsers: elinks, based on links, which I’m pretty sure was a play on words on lynx, which is a play on words on “links” on a web page.

      Then there’s email. There’s mahogany and balsa and mulberry, which are in-jokes referring to pine, which was a joke referring to elm, which stood for ELectronic Mail. Pine has been forked to alpine, in an entirely different play on words.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Open Watcom supports a debugging format called DWARF, which I assumed was a ridiculous acronym, until I learned it only works on ELF binaries.

        The big one is how there was a programming language called A Programming Language. There is a B programming language, but it’s unrelated, being developed for Multics… Multics being the inspiration for Unix, a joke about castration. The developers of B went on to develop C. C was followed up by the command to increment a variable: C++. Except some interdisciplinary dorks thought it was a musical note and created C#. D is somehow a sequel to both of those.

        There’s a reason why-- look. Nicholas Metropolis, namesake of the raytracing method, was sick of mainframe computers with ridiculous acronyms like ENIAC, AVIDAC, and ILLIAC, so he named his university’s new machine MANIAC. Absolutely no-one got the joke. All computer scientists are broken in the same peculiar way, and it is impossible to satirize how stupid we get when asked to name a thing.

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        Pine has been forked to Alpine

        Wonder if it runs on Alpine the Linux distro.

        In other news, I never knew pine’s genetic code still lives on; but I miss elm more. Can we do uw-imap too? Dovecot annoys me.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      8 months ago

      Naming things is hard, and everyone remembers these names, so they must have done something right.

    • KrapKake@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Yea no kidding. Gnome is pronounced Guhnome, Mate DE is pronounced Matay, Open Suse is susuh not soos, and Qt is to be pronounced as “cute” instead of just… Q-T. Many such cases.

      • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Wait for real? I don’t think I’ve heard many say those terms out loud, i pronounce them in my head Nome, Mate, Soos, and q-t

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      My favorite part of the AI boom is how all the stupid internal names become public. It moves so fast that there’s no time to rebrand from the dork-ass things engineers come up with.