[LLVMdev] "Name that compiler"

me22
Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:11:54 -0000

On 4/12/07, Chris Lattner <sabre at nondot.org>
wrote:
> Note that the name need not capture every aspect of the project.  Just
> having a distinguished name with no specific connotation is probably good
> enough.  20 years ago, "google" and "yahoo" had very
different meanings,
> and "mozilla" or "firefox" were pretty meaningless.
Today, there is very
> strong awareness of what they are.
>
That works great for something that gets massive exposure, but GNOME
has made me wary of (what seems to be) completely unrelated names. I
too often get lost in the soup of pango, cairo, epiphany, evolution,
metacity, festival, evince, and such, so I'm not a fan of clever, but
unrelated, words. A portmanteau could be nice, though.

One of the nicer project names I've seen recently is Alexandria, for a
book database program ( http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/ ).  It
unfortunately fails the searchability test, but does brilliantly at
reminding you what it is.

What about heading off into Greek mythology? Perhaps Dædalus, the
greatly skilled Athenian architect that built the palace of Cnossus.
There's also Hephæstus, God of smiths, builder of Helios's chariot,
maker of Talos, Crete and Europa's guardian robot, and fabricator of
the weapons of the Gods; or Lemnos, the island with his workshop.

Unfortunately, they're not the easiest words to spell, and Vulcan,
Hephæstus's roman name, is somewhat used already.

~ Scott McMurray