I’m interested in the origins of the names of code projects, from libraries to languages. I have a theory that many of them are based on wordplay about their domain and other libraries that they interface with. The naming of these things is a usually-unnoticed reference to events not known by the majority of people who use them every day. Tell me about yours! No code is too big or too small.

Inlein

Origin: Wordplay on “inline” and the dominant Clojure build tool, Leiningen (executable name lein)

Credit: zdavis for pointing it out :)

Classification: Domain reference, wordplay

Squash

Origin: “A squarish bug spray” (an alliterative joke about squashing bugs)

Source: github

Classification: Domain / company reference, wordplay

Guten Tag

Origin: “Good tags for a good day!” i.e. “guten tag” which means “I wish you a good day” in German. “Tag” is also an english word which is used commonly in computer science to mean a marker with additional metadata (i.e. tagging a build with version information). Here it is used to mean “tagging” a piece of data with a datatype in order to prevent losing the type information. From the readme: “The solution I came up with was to hack out a new class which behaves just like the above tag prefixed map when you seq it and thus for core.match, but which keeps the tag out of the way”

Source: github

Classification: Domain reference, wordplay (multilingual)

Credit: zdavis for pointing out how good this one was :)

“Candler” aka “Global Voucher Inventory Service”

Origin: It is named after Asa Candler who came up with the idea for the first voucher in 1887.

Source: Groupon internal chat

Classification: Domain reference

Mayara

Origin: PHP silex framework named after MC Mayara in homage to all the times her songs have played in the office’s tiny stereo pompously named RVO - Rádio Voz do Operário

Source: tweet1 tweet2 tweet3

Classification: random

Jindy

Origin: “Conceived for killing our JNDI use. We had 2 ways of (mis)spelling it: jnidi (zhuh-nee-dee) and jindy. Jnidi won in day-to-day conversation.Author of the library always liked jindy best though, and so picked that one as the name”

Source: tweet1 tweet2

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

Mossy

Origin: “Merchant Operating System Sync Service” (Breadcrumb Point of Sale by Groupon)

Source: internal github

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

Cucumber

Origin: Suggested by contributor’s partner

Source: “Just curious- what is the origin of the name “cucumber” for cucumber?” “It’s what my wife suggested when I asked her to come up with a name.” - aslakhellesoy

Classification: random

Reversey

Origin: “A homophone of the name of the game implemented (Reversi) while hilariously spelling it as if it were an adjective”

Source: conversation with zdavis

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

pyrst

Origin: Contains the concatenation of the Python and Rust file extensions (the code being two hours of hacking to sort-of expose a specialization of Rust’s collections::BTreeMap to Python via FFI), while being pronounceable as a homophone of an English word (“pierced”)

Source: conversation with zdavis

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

Javascript

Origin: Named to make it clear that it was complementary with Java

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2653798/application-development/javascript-creator-ponders-past–future.html

Classification: practical / domain reference

Poise

Origin: Thematically related to “Balanced” (the name of company that the author was working at, at the time, and it was unclear how related this would be to their brand). Unlikely to overlap with other things in the namespace. Available toplevel domain, available name on pypi and rubygems and npm. Found by thesaurus search for “balance”. The only major name collision at the time was an australian tampon manufactuer. No, you are not legitimately confused.

Source: coderanger

Classification: practical / origin reference

Java

Origin: Some word that was “dynamic, revolutionary, lively, fun”

Source: java

Classification: practical / random

Hadoop

Origin: The name of the author’s child’s stuffed elephant, which was easy to pronounce and to google

Source: quora

Classification: practical / random

Asgard (Netflix)

Origin: This is a play on ASG from AutoScaling Group. (It is a tool that manages autoscaling groups.)

Source: asgard

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

Python

Origin: Guido was reading “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “needed a name that was short, unique, and slightly mysterious”

Source: faq

Classification: practical / random

Ruby

Origin: Chosen by Matz, in part because it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues

Source: faq

Classification: random

Django

Origin: Named after jazz musician Django Reinhardt, because the framework that Django was extracted from, Ellington was named after a jazz musician because Adrian Holovaty is a jazz fan.

Source: django

Classification: random / wordplay

PIP

Origin: “python installs packages”

Source: pip

Classification: practical / domain reference

Halite

Origin: A gem that is used in cooking (and since it’s a library that turns ruby gems into Chef cookbooks) Name collision with SaltStack web interface - they chose it because of the relatioship of halite to salt) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halite

Source: coderanger

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

Berkshelf

Origin: resetexistence Wanted to name it “Bookshelf” but that couldn’t be googled. the “ermagerd goosebumps” meme was popular at the time, so they ermagerd-ified http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/10/ermahgerd-girl-true-story

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

Ansible

Origin: Named after Orson Scott Card’s instantaneous communications device (which in turn was named after Le Guin’s, but this name was a reference to the reference, not to the true source material- a single-layer symlink)

Source: ansible

Classification: literary reference / domain reference

PostgresSQL

Origin: Is a joke on / reference to Ingres, a database. Before SQL, postgres was the “post-ingress” database. Then the name was changed name to PostgreSQL when they added sql querying (that was a non-universal competitive feature at the time)

Source: history

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

Mezzanine

Origin: a reference to the project mez a predecessor with some of the same aims

Source: conversation with zdavis “(Because the) Zendo project which inspired me was called “mez” and I like my project names to be English words

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

Mez

Origin: “Mez” is the part-of + backwards the usernames of two of my friends who taught me how to play zendo

Source: me

Classification: domain reference

Poltergeist

Origin: phantomJS driver for capybara (phantom and poltergeist are thematically related)

Source: It seems obvious to me but no one has confirmed this

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

Konacha

Origin: A type of green tea (related to what it does- it is a Rails engine that allows you to test your JavaScript with the Mocha test framework and chai assertion library)

Source: konacha

Classification: wordplay / domain reference

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