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Moon landers all get names. Even moon landers that never made it past the design phase probably had codenames.

You've stumbled on yet another situation where you should give something a cute name instead of a descriptive name: If there will be many implementations of the same thing over time. Each generation of Intel processor, each sort algorithm (TimSort, thanks Tim), each rocket, each mid-sized sedan.

Now, do the individual software components within a moon lander get names? That depends! Are they re-used between landers? Are there many different implementations of the same component to choose from for each mission? The more affirmative the answers to these questions, the more likely it is the component will have/should have an actual name, instead of just being, say, "allocator.c".

There are just so many reasons you might want something to have an actual name. Competing implementations or historical implementations, userbase size, project longevity, researchability. And they're all subject to change in the future (and renaming sucks). I have a hard time faulting anybody for giving their little binary data format a name like "parquet", even if it's tiny and only used in one place by one other thing and might never have any users. Because it might end up used for a long time, or by many people, or in a period of competition with another implementation of the same thing. If any of those things comes true, you're going to be glad you didn't name it "Hierarchical Data Format".



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