this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Serious answer is that each component is it's own project named for all kinds of reasons; often somekind of reference to a previous thing that they're trying to replace, sometimes to fit into an ecosystem or org's scheme, sometimes an initialism no-one thought to say out loud, sometimes it's a flippant name for quick throwaway program that then somehow becomes major infrastructure but it's too late to change it now.
ok and what is the nonserious answer
Computers work by magic and they are concealing their true names to prevent privelege escalation vunerabilities.
HAH. I KNEW IT
this is also why power-cycling works.
That's more of a death threat to the pixies
That's 99% of it. Naming things suck, and as soon as you share it and people start using it you can't change the name.
I feel like around the late 2010s we started getting more "serious" names for things. I do always love the
packageNscheme though. Especially when there's like no historical record or real usage of versions 1-(N-1) lolPython is littered with numbered packages that don't have any maintained or distributed precursors anymore, but they're forever
urllib3,jinja2orhttplib2.Remember, folks: Wine Is Not an Emulator.