dtm-ufth_dif2grok-pmdw3
May 4, 2007 – 12:20 pmTitle translation: ‘Don’t tell me you find this difficult to understand purple monkey dishwasher (version 3)’.
Preston Gralla on O’Reilly Net complains that Linux package names are preventing wider Linux desktop adoption. While I find his claim that Linux will never get there extreme, I do agree this is a significant hindrance.
Such package names simply shouldn’t be presented to regular users at all, even in the context of browsing packages. Sure, people can just ignore them, but don’t underestimate the psychological toll of being confronted with a stream of information you can’t even categorize let alone understand.
More generally, I oppose the Unix/old-style-programming practice of privileging ease-of-typing and compactness in names over descriptiveness. Even for those attempting to verse themselves in the lingo, the level of contextual familiarity presumed by this preponderance of abbreviations makes the learning curve very steep.
