The Project Name Problem - projname

Sean B. Palmer
2005-02-03T03:15:51Z

The woes of naming a project discussed. This is somewhat random and thread-mode oriented at the moment, but it does come with an overview of the statement and uses eph itself as the main case example.

The Project Name Problem

When you say that a problem is NP complete to a computer scientist, they'll nod at you solemnly. Of course, they'll think it means non-polynomial time complete, but in this case Name Problem is just as apt: I find that naming my projects sometimes significantly impedes their publication (or, at the very least, it's a good excuse for not publishing that should probably be removed).

I tend to alliterate in "p" best, and the project names that I've devised through 2004 and 2005 reflect this: pwyky, phenny, pyllbox, ppr, pyrple. But each of these names is a good example of the battle to find something apt to the project.

pwyky - This one came after a few day brainstorming session with William Loughborough. On one occasion, we filled a side of a piece of paper with naming suggestions, and actually that helped since I derived the eventual name from one of those.

phenny - phenny was probably the easiest of the lot because it was very much a stream-of-consciousness descision. Actually, it's probably the best name of the lot too, so that points towards a solution: don't fret it! The opposite to what you need to do to play guitar well.

pyllbox - Again, this one took ages and the result isn't all that good. I wanted something with "py" in the name, and it's good to give yourself a requirement in order to overcome the tyrrany of the blank page. But it's not a good name generally since it doesn't sound marketable.

ppr - ppr was just a small project, and I actually forget what the name stands for. Perhaps something like Python Preprocessing Rsomething. But again it's not all that good since it's not Googlecountable; though I did coin it with a nod to all the other three-letter-unix-tools.

pyrple - This took a long, long time. Naming RDF APIs is probably the hardest thing to do. I'm not even sure why I went with pyrple, though I'm still fairly pleased with it because it was the first thing that I thought of that made me think "yeah, that'll do", thus ending the big naming crisis.

This is probably just a personal problem, but I really find that I generate projects a lot more easily than I generate names for them, and I'm also quite a perfectionist when it comes to names—even though there's no such thing as a perfect name. Notwithstanding, I think that investment in choosing a good name for a project is important, even if it does turn into an {@@link Atom} style debacale.

Colophon

Perhaps I should get phenny to name a project for me:

<sbp> phenny: generate a word for me
<phenny> hanglebug
<sbp> bleh. I really need something that'll generate
   decent project names for me

But it doesn't seem like it'll work. There are, of course, name generators out there, but they're not as witty as humans (yet) at coming up with words. They're still pretty good for use in stuff like Ghyll, on the other hand.

Namestorming

Namestorm: to come up with a series of words in order to name a project.

.gc namestorm
<phenny> namestorm: 179
.gc namestorming
<phenny> namestorming: 159

The reason I wrote projname is that I need a name for this pwk-using wiki, but I'm not sure what to go for. I wrote about this a bit at crschmidt's noets installation at Nomenclatural Dilemma, but nobody's offered any ideas yet so I'm still unsure as to what to pick. One name that I don't reject on there is "/pwk/", but I'm going to reject it here instead since I don't think it's a good idea to name sites after their mechanics. On other other hand, it's okay to name mechanics after the site, which is what happened for the noets code.

(Incidental point: when enterting data on IRC, it's actually being stored five times for me. Once in my keylogs, once in my IRC logs, twice on Vorpal (miscoranda and inamidst), and once in my local inamidst copy.) @@ fix enterting I'd like it to be something along the lines of jotpad, notey, scribblex, miscnotes, eph, notatia, writings...

.gc jotpad
<phenny> jotpad: 519
.gc notey
<phenny> notey: 23,000
.gc scribblex
<phenny> scribblex: 16
.gc miscnotes
<phenny> miscnotes: 583
.gc eph
<phenny> eph: 1,640,000
.gc notatia
<phenny> notatia: 732
.gc writings
<phenny> writings: 10,900,000

Chris comments that he likes jotpad and notatia, but is a bit wary even of the rather low (by today's standards) 732 Googlecount for it. Scribblex is certainly very low gc-wise, but really, anything under 1000 these days is very good and easily beatable. Google just keep increasing their index...

Update on the candidates: ecl, eph, eup, inf, and wis...

Nowadays, Sean makes me name everything. Or sometimes Chris. Also, sbp should edit this post and write a good concluding statement to this post --by d8uv on #d8uv.com

How We Named it "eph"

As d8uv notes above, I do usually ask them to come up with names so that I can work on the important business of fretting about it. But we named eph quite quickly, mainly through crschmidt's cajoling and the fact that I really just wanted to get it all in place since I was using it already.

So I chose "eph" mainly because it's the best one on the candidates list; rather, that it's the one that sucks the least. Though it has a high Googlecount, it's a very nice short name, and I didn't want to have anything that's too long and semantically linked. Having "eph" means it's practically a particle, with only a hint of any ephemeral connotations.

"It's also cool sounding. That's why I cajoled." --crschmidt on #d8uv.com

Sean B. Palmer