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Software developers have abandoned descriptive naming conventions in favor of arbitrary, whimsical names for tools and libraries. Unlike other engineering disciplines where names convey function (I-beams, butterfly valves, IUPAC nomenclature), modern software is filled with meaningless names like Cobra, Viper, and Melody that force developers to constantly context-switch and look up documentation. This cognitive tax wastes time and mental energy across the industry. Early computing followed better patterns (grep, sed, FORTRAN, COBOL), but around the 2010s, startup culture and GitHub popularized quirky naming. The solution is cultural: prioritize clarity over creativity, use descriptive compound terms, and reserve cute names for mascots rather than the tools themselves.

Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

The thing is that a library never lasts forever, and you’ll eventually end up with “dotenv” on pypi, a unmaintained library. So someone else comes up with “python-dotenv”… The problem with descriptive naming is that it doesn’t work on the long run if you have to reserve space for that name on a registry
Typst actually has <a href="https://github.com/typst/packages/blob/main/docs/manifest.md#naming-rules" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">a policy</a> to prevent descriptive names for published packages, because it’d raise someone’s package as the solution to the problem it’s named after, which is already not great, but becomes even more annoying once the package is abandonned:
<blockquote>
Package names should not be the obvious or canonical name for a package with that functionality (e.g. slides is forbidden, but sliding or slitastic would be ok). We have this rule because users will find packages with these canonical names first, creating an unfair advantage for the package author who claimed that name. Names should not include the word “typst” (as it is redundant). If they contain multiple words, names should use kebab-case.
</blockquote>
Molecules and metal structure parts have… Nothing to do with this lmao
This namespacing problem is solved by Go though, cuz you have no way to have a non-namespaced package. But when people talk about a package (as evidenced by the article itself, Cobra is a Go library), they’ll inevitably talk about the repo name without the owner part in front of it, so namespacing alone is not a solution
In a way, library names would be the équivalent of a brand of I-beams, because it’s a developer’s take on e.g. a analytics library

If it’s an open source project: name it whatever you like. Because this:
Every person who encounters your “fun” name pays a small tax.
Is nothing compared to the ‘tax’ that goes into building and maintaining open source software. If the name is something that gives you even the tiniest bit of positive energy, go for it.

hey! Naming your variables i,j,k is best practice.

Devs name variables, functions, classes so often and we still suck at naming.
I feel this so much. I still wince at some of my old variable and class names, and I’m low‑key scared to show that code to anyone.
I spent an absurd amount of time naming my latest project <a href="https://github.com/alchira" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Alchira (alchemy + chimera)</a> – a DSL fusion of HTML and CSS – and honestly it still feels like a win just because it’s not completely random and actually hints at what it does.