Tales from the jar side: A rant on how naming things is hard (with my three least favorites) and some entertaining tweets
Led Zeppelin was supposed to be a bad name for a band, until they turned out to be freakin' Led Zeppelin
Welcome, jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of October 31 - November 7, 2021. This week I taught a Basic Android Development course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, a Deep Dive Into Spring course as an NFJS Virtual Workshop, and played in a chess tournament (the 26th Northeast Open) in Stamford, CT, which is where I am right now.
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Naming Things Is Hard
There’s an old saying in IT that goes:
There are two hard problems in computer science:
1. cache invalidation and
2. naming things.
(For my nontechnical friends: a cache is a temporary collection of previously computed values. If the same computation comes up again, you can just reuse the value in the cache. Invalidating a cache means deciding the previous values are out of date and need to be refreshed. Kind of obscure, but it’s certainly a hard problem.)
Of course, some jokes are inevitable:
There are two hard problems in computer science:
1. cache invalidation,
2. naming things, and
3. off-by-one errors
Har har har. Normally I’d quote a tweet of that, but I assume nobody wants to be associated with that gag any more.
Here’s another variation, which I will use from a tweet:
I’d call that nicely self-referential, or even meta, except the name Meta (with a capital letter) has now been co-opted for nefarious purposes (in the sense that pretty much everything Facebook does is for nefarious purposes). Of course, Facebook itself is a bad name, based on Zuckerberg’s original program designed to evaluate the hotness of fellow students, which kind of says it all, doesn’t it?
The reason I bring this up is I was dealing with the recent release of Java 17, and up until a few months ago, the easiest place to get a completely free version was adoptopenjdk.net. I really liked the name of that site. It’s clear, easy to understand, and tells you exactly what it does, which is to provide a free build of the OpenJDK project. But apparently there were licensing issues (otherwise known as “Oracle Gonna Oracle,” given that their legal department is rumored to be five times the size of their development division) and they weren’t allowed to continue using that name. So instead the project was moved to the Eclipse foundation, where some marketing genius decided rebranding it as Eclipse Adoptium was a good idea.
The word Adoptium (ugh) makes me think of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The motto of that company was “Share and Enjoy,” and their products were so vile the Hitchhiker’s Guide says their complaint department covered all the major land masses of the occupied planets in the Sirius system. It also referred to their members as “A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”
(I still miss Douglas Adams. I met him once. The fourth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy” of six books is So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, which was published in 1984. (The previous books were 1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and 3. Life, the Universe, and Everything, which admittedly got somewhat less funny as they went along.) Anyway, Adams came to do a book signing in Cambridge, MA and did a talk at MIT while I was there. I attended the talk, stood in line for the signing, (re-)bought all four books and got them autographed. I think I still have them somewhere, though I despair at the amount of digging it would take to find them, as well as the probable condition of 35 year old paperbacks.)
So anyway, Adoptium is now a project at the Eclipse Foundation (motto: we’re way more than just the Eclipse development environment! Really! We promise!).
The name Eclipse has a bit of a past, too, though most developers are not aware of it. The Eclipse Project was founded by IBM along with a bunch of small fry in November 2001. Notable by its absence was any mention of Sun Microsystems (creator of Java), and given that Eclipse was written in and for Java, that was odd. At least it was until you realized that there is a relationship between the words Sun and Eclipse (get it?), a relationship which IBM denies to this day.
Back to the marketing mush that is Adoptium. Apparently that name isn’t bad enough. All the other Java vendors brand their releases, like Amazon Corretto (from the Italian word meaning “correct,” and isn’t that just like Amazon to claim that?) or IBM Semeru (Semeru is an active volcano in East Java, get it?), or Azul Zulu (which somehow connects to There is no Dana, only Zuul, though I’m not quite sure how).
The Adoptium people needed a name for their distribution, too. They came up with: Temurin. That’s right — the full name of their Java distribution is Eclipse Adoptium Temurin. Good luck with that in your spell-checkers.
What’s Temurin, other than being hard to pronounce? First, it’s an organic molecule that somewhat resembles caffeine (Java again, get it?):
Here’s just the image:
I hope that makes sense to somebody, but I’m not an organic chemist. The other meaning of the word Temurin is that it’s an anagram of the word runtime. Har har har yet again. In the end, the nice, simple, AdoptOpenJDK project ultimately became Eclipse Adoptium Temurin. Yay.
I get it. Naming things is hard. I really wish my first love as a programming language had been named something other than Groovy. The worst part of Groovy is that their interpolated strings are not called Groovy Strings, like they ought to be, but GStrings. The associated gag is even worse: You do string interpolation (as in “Hello, $name!”) by stuffing a dollar in a GString. Sigh. It’s funny for about 10 minutes. After that it’s just embarrassing. It’s hard enough to get a language named Groovy taken seriously by the Fortune 500 without going there, but what can you do?
As bad a name as Eclipse Adoptium Temurin is, it’s only third on my list of Least Favorite Software Project Names. Number 2 arrived when the JBoss Application Server rebranded itself as … wait for it … Wildfly.
Here’s the logo:
Yuck. That’s right — they named their own software after a bug, and not just any bug, a bug you really want to swat. They renamed it years ago, and I still won’t use it. I don’t want some flying insect buzzing around my code. I’ll bet it bites and everything. Eww.
For the record, my number one Least Favorite Software Project Name is: CockroachDB. Sorry, no freakin’ way. I’m not even going there, and any marketing email I get from the company (the aptly named Cockroach Labs) I delete unopened.
You know what’s a really good name for a software product? Java. The famous story is that James Gosling, the creator of the language, wanted to call it Oak, after a tree outside his office window. A trademark search found that Oak had already been used, so his changed the name based on his own coffee mug, and the rest is history.
This weekend I’m at a chess tournament, as I mentioned above. My favorite defense for Black against 1. e4 used to be called the Center Counter Defense, but back in the 1980s it got renamed the Scandinavian, which is a much cooler name. That sounds like something World Champion Magnus Carlsen (from Norway) would play, and he does. Of course, he plays everything (including — I kid you not — the bongcloud). I like the Scandi, and it’s given me good results, at least until today when I let my stupid Queen get trapped and lost a piece. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s what put me in the mood for this whole rant in the first place.
ABBA is another good name, made up of the first letters of each member (Agnetha, Björn, Bennie, and Anni-Frid). My experience is that the Voyage album is … okay. It sounds like them, but mostly it sounds like a bunch of B-sides (kids, ask your parents) to their real hits.
Amusing Tweets
Just a few this week. First, cue Louis Armstrong for this image taken from a tweet:
We had the anniversary of a significant event from 40 years ago:
Took me a minute to parse this one, but it’s very true:
This is seasonally appropriate:
This tells a story. Be sure to watch until the end:
Finally, this was an adventure, and I assume it’s not over yet.
My gags are bad, but I promise they’ve never bitten any kids on the arm or had to be pried off in a hospital. Nor are any named Pole Assassin, which I must admit is an awesome name for a stripper.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Basic Android Development, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Deep Dive: Spring and Spring Boot, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
This week:
Week 1 of Spring in 3 Weeks, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Latest Features in Java, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
Java Testing with JUnit 5 and Mockito, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
I assume that the joke "There are 10 types of people in the world..." is also a programming joke, at least I use it :)
> nobody wants to be associated with that gag any more.
=( I use that joke all the time. The kids out of college hadn't heard it yet, and I'm amazed at how many grizzled veterans haven't.