juliebean,

my favorite name origin for a bit of software relates to the text editor nano. nano was written as a standalone clone of Pico, as a play on metric prefixes, but Pico is actually Pine compositor, part of Pine, an email client. Pine itself was based on an earlier email client called Elm, and has been attributed as various recursive acronyms such as ‘Pine Is Nearly Elm’

jungle,

TWAIN, the protocol used in fax machines, comes from Technology Without An Interesting Name.

Edit: aww, wikipedia says that’s a myth. I’m leaving it here because it’s too good not to be true.

dot20,

PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

JohnSmith,

Never ever let facts get in the way of a good story!

makr_alland,

A real-life moth was found to be the cause of errors in a computer, popularizing the terms “bug” and “debugging”. The culprit was attached to the report as proof:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging#/media/File%3AF…

Ambiorickx,

While the story is true, it’s not the origin of the terms “bug” and “debugging.” Those terms were already in use in Edison’s time.

makr_alland,

Yes, that’s what the page I linked to says, and why I said “popularized” and not “originated”.

Kerb,
@Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

cat (as in concatenate)
prints a file to stdout

head & tail print the beginning / end of a file

dot20,

GNU’s Not UNIX

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

WINE Is Not an Emulator

Haus,
Haus avatar

Not so much of a joke as a cute story. There was once a programmer with a dog named Biff who would bark at the mailman every time he delivered the mail. The programmer wrote a program to monitor incoming email and beep when you got a message, and named it biff.

lemmyng,
@lemmyng@lemmy.ca avatar

Less is more.

mygnu,

What? and I am a programmer 😅

lemmyng,
@lemmyng@lemmy.ca avatar

Compiler compiler (cc) -> yet another compiler compiler (yacc) -> bison (because yacc sounds like “yak”)

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • programmer_humor@programming.dev
  • khanakhh
  • magazineikmin
  • mdbf
  • GTA5RPClips
  • everett
  • rosin
  • Youngstown
  • tacticalgear
  • slotface
  • ngwrru68w68
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • thenastyranch
  • tester
  • JUstTest
  • ethstaker
  • cubers
  • osvaldo12
  • cisconetworking
  • Durango
  • InstantRegret
  • normalnudes
  • Leos
  • modclub
  • anitta
  • provamag3
  • megavids
  • lostlight
  • All magazines