• Ziglin@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    Wait why didn’t they keep unpacking the recursive acronym further? GNU’s Not Unix’s Not Unix’s Not Unix’s Not Unix I’d say that’s a pretty good amount although if there’s a mathematical way of formulating the unpacking of acronyms in a text I’d like to see the that repeated until infinity.

  • Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    7 months ago

    im almost sad that its linux that became the dominating open source kernel instead of “GNU’s Not Unix! Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons”
    (hird stands for “Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth”)

  • okamiueru@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    With just little bit of formatting, it would communicate the information infinitely better. Why don’t people make the minimal effort, once, when not doing leads to each and everyone having to figure out what the fuck it’s actually trying to say.

    Apologies. I’m grumpy after a three hour meeting.

    • nexussapphire@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      the real problem is this sentence contains no formatting no punctuation and no capitalization it must be a failure of our public education system in america that kid dont get the proper education they need in this day and age to use proper gramer and formatting where needed i bet most of you cant tell me the proper time to use a semicolon vs using a colon and thats ok because i dont either i do try my best to put it in the right place sometimes looking it up and failing to understand comas are also frequently used to much by people im sure your not alone in this assumption it could also be that english is hard and schools spend more time teaching us to consume and parse english rather than a balance of both reading comprehension and writing skills

      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        7 months ago

        A semicolon is used when you’re separating sentences that are themselves part of a list. Typically you would use commas to separate list items, but when the list items are complete sentences with commas in them, you use a semicolon to separate them. A colon is used when you have to poop

      • nexussapphire@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        Typing this thing was admittedly hard on the phone. Without selecting any suggestions, it still manages to get the capitalization and punctuation right.

  • waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    Also, almost all of that is written in C, which is a successor to B, which is a simplified version of the Basic Combined Programming Language. There was never an A.

  • Margot Robbie@lemm.ee
    0·
    7 months ago

    “GNU is Not Unix Image Manipulation Program Tool Kit” is still a better name for GTK than “GIMP ToolKit”.

    It’s a name that will definitely raise some eyebrows in the less technically inclined circles. (and maybe a few “Pulp Fiction” references about “bring out the gimp”)

    • dan@upvote.au
      0·
      7 months ago

      Naming things is hard, and everyone remembers these names, so they must have done something right.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      7 months ago

      My favorite part of the AI boom is how all the stupid internal names become public. It moves so fast that there’s no time to rebrand from the dork-ass things engineers come up with.

    • KrapKake@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 months ago

      Yea no kidding. Gnome is pronounced Guhnome, Mate DE is pronounced Matay, Open Suse is susuh not soos, and Qt is to be pronounced as “cute” instead of just… Q-T. Many such cases.

      • cmbabul@lemmy.world
        0·
        7 months ago

        Wait for real? I don’t think I’ve heard many say those terms out loud, i pronounce them in my head Nome, Mate, Soos, and q-t

    • tal@lemmy.today
      0·
      7 months ago

      Web browsers: elinks, based on links, which I’m pretty sure was a play on words on lynx, which is a play on words on “links” on a web page.

      Then there’s email. There’s mahogany and balsa and mulberry, which are in-jokes referring to pine, which was a joke referring to elm, which stood for ELectronic Mail. Pine has been forked to alpine, in an entirely different play on words.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        7 months ago

        Open Watcom supports a debugging format called DWARF, which I assumed was a ridiculous acronym, until I learned it only works on ELF binaries.

        The big one is how there was a programming language called A Programming Language. There is a B programming language, but it’s unrelated, being developed for Multics… Multics being the inspiration for Unix, a joke about castration. The developers of B went on to develop C. C was followed up by the command to increment a variable: C++. Except some interdisciplinary dorks thought it was a musical note and created C#. D is somehow a sequel to both of those.

        There’s a reason why-- look. Nicholas Metropolis, namesake of the raytracing method, was sick of mainframe computers with ridiculous acronyms like ENIAC, AVIDAC, and ILLIAC, so he named his university’s new machine MANIAC. Absolutely no-one got the joke. All computer scientists are broken in the same peculiar way, and it is impossible to satirize how stupid we get when asked to name a thing.

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
        0·
        7 months ago

        Pine has been forked to Alpine

        Wonder if it runs on Alpine the Linux distro.

        In other news, I never knew pine’s genetic code still lives on; but I miss elm more. Can we do uw-imap too? Dovecot annoys me.

  • monk@lemmy.unboiled.info
    0·
    7 months ago

    And before Pidgin was named Pidgin, it was named GAIM, which was short for GTK AIM, which was short for GIMP toolkit AOL IM, which was short for GNU Image Manipulation Program toolkit America Online Instant Messenger, which was short for GNU’s Not Unix Image Manipulation Program toolkit America Online Instant Messenger and it never ends.