Stop Making Sense
EVERYBODY PANIC! The technology industry is running out of a fundamental finite resource. But the problem this time isn’t scarce chips or broken servers, and it certainly isn’t venture capital — it’s words. Certain corners of the software world are starting to run short on unclaimed terminology, and as such it may soon no longer be possible to talk about tech coherently. That’s too bad, because it’s hard enough already!
Before a piece of software can run, it first lives as a set of letters and characters which are saved in discrete files just like your spreadsheets or documents or anything else on your computer. When you’re creating a new project, you need to come up with a filename into which to save the code — but increasingly, the possible names are already taken because other developers got to them first and published the results of their work. Particularly in the case of JavaScript, the wildly popular language used for building web interactivity, most reasonable identifiers have by now been claimed. Wheelbarrow.js. Cucumber.js. All four Ninja Turtles (leonardo.js, donatello.js, raphael.js, michaelangelo.js). Go ahead, try a few of your own ideas.
Picking a project name is (is.js) by now (now.js) a (a.js) widely-acknowledged problem dreaded by programmers preparing a project for release. It’s hard to even find an unclaimed noun at all, never mind one that has some reasonable…
