project naming

Posted Apr 7, 2011 16:15 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
In reply to: project naming by pjm
Parent article: TXLF: HeliOS helps schoolkids and challenges developers

> If you dislike the name Choqok, then you can see the futility in trying to provide a cognitive pathway. ('Choqok' provides as good a cognitive pathway for a Twitter client as any, to people who know it as a word meaning "sparrow".)

Not to mention that the average non computer literate person doesn't know what twitter is anyway (I have to say, I am not even sure I know what twitter is). Name confusion is not a free software problem, it comes with any complex domain and it is not likely going away. Are the problems real? Yes. Is there really a way around it? I doubt it.

With complexity, if you are going to communicate, you need large vocabularies, and thus complexity. The vocabulary is there to help those in the know, not to make things complicated for those who don't. It is complicated for them, with or without the vocabulary. Blaming the vocabulary seems like a miss placed complaint, pointing at a symptom, not the cause of the complexity.