On naming your projects…

Tuesday, February 21st, 2006

I used to name my projects based on really cool acronyms like “PROMS” (Project Management System) and “Nimf” (Non-irritating Manager of Files). When I got a bit more serious about my little programmings, I decided not to give them nonsensical names anymore but instead tried to come up with original, but more importantly, meaningful names. It’s a lot easier to guess what a program called “ListPatron” or “DataQ” does.

Check out these absolutely brilliant project names:

• Pessulus
• Sabayon
• Yelp
• Ekiga
• Metacity

Can you guess what function these programs fulfill? Neither can I. If you’re curious, they’re names of programs and utilities in the upcoming Gnome 2.14 release. I got the names from the ‘A look at GNOME 2.14‘ article.

Their functions are as follows:

• Pessulus: Functionality lockdowm administrator tool
• Sabayon: Group profile creator administrator tool
• Yelp: Gnome help browser
• Ekiga: The formerly known ‘GNOME Meeting’
• Metacity: The GNOME window manager

Who would’ve guessed?! Where did they get these names from? Who comes up with this stuff? I guess you can get away with shitty names like these if you’re a small-time developer nobody has ever heard of or if you’re only making low-level tools (such as GIT). But for an end-user desktop environment like GNOME, stuff should be called ‘Group profile administrator’ and ‘GNOME Help browser’.

Let’s hope they don’t actually but these names in the menu’s like this.