> I explained the issue. In case you need to see it
That's an awful lot of sass from someone who didn't bother to read my post:
1. You're not using the language name in your search query like I suggested one should. So your example is moot.
2. You're still being highly critical about something that is awfully hard to get right. Naming projects is one of the hardest things you can do to a project. Firefox went through 2 naming collisions before they landed on Firefox. As an open source contributor myself I frequently get people say "Your name is used by this thing over here too" despite me spending literally hours going through multiple different name options and Googling them to see if they have a presence (search engines aren't always good for checking this stuff by the way).
When there are hundreds of thousands of people creating software each month, you quickly run out of phonetics to use. While naming might seem like an infinitely large namespace, in practice there's only a finite number of names out there yet a literal infinity of projects due to new ones popping up all the time. So collisions aren't just inevitable, they're going to become more frequent too.
This is why open source frameworks for different languages where the spellings differ is fine in my opinion because you should always include the language you're targeting in your search query for more accurate results anyway.
Sometimes I think people just like to throw namespace collisions as a criticism on HN because they're too lazy to research the framework properly but still want to appear knowledgeable to everyone else. It's literally the lowest effort critique one can make on a project.
I pointed this out because pixi.js was the first thing I thought off when I read the title of this post. Others have pointed out they made the same association.
Do you really want to pretend with all your might that naming your graphics library after the same creature as another graphics library is a good idea? Really?
Coincidentally I just named a rendering library for WebGL a few days ago and it's already the first result on google.
Naming projects isn't that hard if you don't want a 3-6 letter name. There's only so many possible combinations of five characters. You'd think software developers of all people would understand that and maybe stop giving their projects short names that look like acronyms and convey literally no meaning.
The easiest way is to pick a longer descriptive name with a good acronym. If your project becomes popular, it'll become known by that acronym. Most 2 word combinations aren't taken either.
> I pointed this out because pixi.js was the first thing I thought off when I read the title of this post. Others have pointed out they made the same association.
People make associations all the time with often unrelated things. That's exactly how our brains are wired to operate. The fact is the names in question are still different.
> Coincidentally I just named a rendering library for WebGL a few days ago and it's already the first result on google.
Google tailors results. And I bet if you shared the name of your library I'd find some similar project that I have an association with when I hear your name.
> Naming projects isn't that hard
Naming things is incredibly hard!
> There's only so many possible combinations of five characters. You'd think software developers of all people would understand that and maybe stop giving their projects short names that look like acronyms and convey literally no meaning.
Love the contradiction of how you start out by saying naming things isn't hard and then go on to explain why naming things is hard. It's also worth noting that adding more characters creates might create more entropy but there's still only so many phonetic phrases available before you drift into the realm of stupidly long names.
> The easiest way is to pick a longer descriptive name with a good acronym. If your project becomes popular, it'll become known by that acronym. Most 2 word combinations aren't taken either.
Please no. Acronyms are almost as bad for names as stupid pseudo-words (like SPDY and NGINX). A name doesn't have to be English, but it should at least be a word. Otherwise you're making things artificially hard for anyone who isn't a native English speaker or who has reading difficulties (like dyslexia).
Like I keep saying, naming things is incredibly hard.
That's an awful lot of sass from someone who didn't bother to read my post:
1. You're not using the language name in your search query like I suggested one should. So your example is moot.
2. You're still being highly critical about something that is awfully hard to get right. Naming projects is one of the hardest things you can do to a project. Firefox went through 2 naming collisions before they landed on Firefox. As an open source contributor myself I frequently get people say "Your name is used by this thing over here too" despite me spending literally hours going through multiple different name options and Googling them to see if they have a presence (search engines aren't always good for checking this stuff by the way).
When there are hundreds of thousands of people creating software each month, you quickly run out of phonetics to use. While naming might seem like an infinitely large namespace, in practice there's only a finite number of names out there yet a literal infinity of projects due to new ones popping up all the time. So collisions aren't just inevitable, they're going to become more frequent too.
This is why open source frameworks for different languages where the spellings differ is fine in my opinion because you should always include the language you're targeting in your search query for more accurate results anyway.
Sometimes I think people just like to throw namespace collisions as a criticism on HN because they're too lazy to research the framework properly but still want to appear knowledgeable to everyone else. It's literally the lowest effort critique one can make on a project.