Paul Graham in Arc: An Unfinished Dialect of Lisp:
Software designers usually fall into either the short-name school or the long-name school. Unix and C favor short names. Common Lisp and Smalltalk are in the opposite camp. The argument for long names is that they are more descriptive, and so make it easier for programmers, especially beginners, to remember what the underlying operators do. The argument against long names is that they clutter up your program. Here again we are saved by our axiom that the user is a good programmer. We assume the user doesn't need operators to be called multiple-value-bind or invoke-restart-interactively to remember what they do. [¶ Arc at 3 weeks: Nov2001]
Wikipedia in Mu_(negative):
According to the Jargon File, a collection of hacker jargon and culture, mu (here pronounced "moo") is considered by Discordians to be the correct answer to the classic logical fallacy of the loaded question "Have you stopped beating your wife?"[1] Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. As a result, various Discordians proposed mu as the correct answer, alleged by them to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions". [bold emphasis added]
Choose one of these demos for sample code and related docs, developed together to motivate þ C++ code for this purpose.
mu: toy, peg, imm, tag, box, symbol, token, number, bigint, class, method, reader, writer, eval, env, vm, gc, world, pcode, compiler, asm, lathe, lisp, smalltalk, design, weight, jar, card, harp, debug, profile
thorn: todo, names, iovec, assert, log, run, hex, crc, buf, in, out, quote, escape, compare, file, deck, cow, arc, blob, tree, slice, rand, time, stat, heap, node, primes, page, book, pile, stack, atomic, lock, mutex, thread, map, meter, list, iter, ctype
The new mu menu links future toy language pages. Many demos are stubs; see todo for a thorn demo guide, or toy for mu updates. Also see names for an overview of naming schemes.
Lauren Wood in Naming Names, 24may2007:
Phil Karlton said (at least once in my hearing anyway) that naming things was one of the two hard tasks in computer science (reading X Toolkit Intrinsics C Language Interface, to which he contributed, will give you some idea why he said it); I discovered the truth of this yet again when writing the FAQ for our Identity Provider for OpenID. In this case, it was even more convoluted, being about what to name the thing that names names.
Tim Bray in Expect Semantic gaps, 09jan2006:
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things" said Phil Karlton. Designing an XML vocabulary is all about agreeing on names for things, and thus it's hard.
The disease's symptoms are semantic gaps, painfully familiar to anyone who's done application integration at a large scale. It's astounding how similar-sounding things can have completely different meanings; the example that burns brightest in my mind right now happened in the Atom Working Group last year; we spun our wheels for weeks and weeks trying to agree what an entry's "Last-Updated" date really meant. No, I'm not kidding.
Wikipedia in English_alphabet:
Thorn and eth are now both represented by th, though thorn continued in existence for some time, its lower case form gradually becoming graphically indistinguishable from the minuscule y in most handwritings. Y for th can still be seen in pseudo-archaisms such as Ye Olde Booke Shoppe. [bold emphasis added]
naming « Þ
