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Discussion on: Is there an art to naming projects?

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Michiel Hendriks • Edited

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton

(Often extended with the joke: "and off-by-one errors")

There is no art. Naming things is just plain difficult. Be it names for types, methods/functions, or variables. Names for projects are probably the most difficult. That's why most projects have terrible names. Quite often they start with a placeholder name, with the intent to make up a better in the near future. But that rarely happens.

One way to approach it is to find a relatable name in the public domain, and change it a bit. For example.

Step 1: pick a character from the Greek mythology which did/said something which relates to your project
Step 2: find out some other project already uses
Step 3: back to step one
Step 4: give up and use a random name generator

Or,

Step 1: make a single sentence description of what your project does
Step 2: take the first letters of each word and make a name out of it
Step 3: unable to make a name from it, back to step one
Step 4: give up and use a random name generator