At least it is search engine friendly. Recently had to search for code snippets for the 30 year old "expect" tool. Was rather difficult and I thought, well the Web is younger than that tool, they could not imagine a search engine. Hint: "expect script" seemed to work decently well.

(.. or a search on https://pkgs.org to surface metadata)

Looks like it's a silly and self-aware play on the word "builder" (New England regional dialect):

> Since I’m relatively new to the world of containers and images, I was excited to learn about the Buildah tool. Especially since I’m a native New Englander and it’s a clever play on how we say Builder in these parts. [0]

[0] https://buildah.io/blogs/2017/06/22/introducing-buildah.html

That is correct. The person who largely had overall responsibility for Red Hat’s open source container tooling is a Boston area native.

Much like the choice to stop using language features like capitalization, it’s part of the current cultural trend.

Kinda like Buildly or Buildr. It’s cool until it’s your turn to be old. Then you look back and wince.

I've been using no capitalization on short messages in chat for more than 20 years (and still do), but an entire article written in the style makes it harder to read. It's funny that the author believes in syntax highlighting for code readability but not capitalization for English readability.

> but an entire article written in the style makes it harder to read

That's purely a familiarity effect; it's a self-solving problem.

Perhaps I'd become effortlessly fluent in Aramaic if I had to read enough articles in it, but absent some substantial benefit I'd prefer to keep with standard English.

You would, but it would take a while. Reading slightly different letter forms is more of a matter of hours.

> it’s part of the current cultural trend

Is it, or it's just a niche just like people who write 5 digit years, putting a 0 in front?

It's still very rare to encounter any of those.

Is it a current trend? my Mom does this and she picked it up in the 70's on typewriters.

Those people are so short sighted. I put two 0's in front because I really care about humanity. This, I believe, will help fix climate change. Excuse me while I sniff my own farts.

I mean "buildah" is at least searchable (imagine trying to look for a build tool called "builder"). The lack of capitalization doesn't have any positive side-effects, apart from saving your shift key some use..

> who the hell calls a tool "buildah"?

Bostonians? :P

Since it's a name I'm fine with it. That is actually some people's pronounciation, even if no one's spelling, but I have no problem taking them seriously since they are not simply putting annoying affectation into writing, it's a name. Names have to be distinct, and they don't have to be cute but it's also not exactly damning either.

All that said, probably wouldn't have been my choice either.

It's weird. I personally wouldn't want quite such a silly name for that particular kind of tool, but that is a funny thing for me to say because I was never one of the people who wanted to remove the swear words from the kernel because "professional impression". Don't ask me to explain it.

> hell calls a tool "buildah"?

people who seem to have done a pretty good job

I mean branding logo for a this kind of tool really doesn't matter and if so why should you hire a graphic designer to do that for you if you already have something which is passable.

You can read it as build-ah, ah is in some languages the word for the sound people make when they have a insight/light bulb moment. It might also just be a coincidence, idk.

But most importantly it's nicely searchable word, it's memorable too, it's pronounceable and it's somewhat related to what it does (a "build" tool).

So in all the metrics which matter it's a good name.