* separate whimsy in learning from whimsy in the ecosystem: if the program is a teaching example in a book, then i think "Nikogiri" is an ok name, esp. if there are cartoons
* whimsy in the ecosystem is ok as long as it doesn't impede functionality. indeed, in some cases, a little added whimsy might help (human) memory in some hot spots: rfc3339-somethingorother is one example of a library that i'd like to have renamed "Nikogiri". there are like half-a-dozen of these little 100-line libraries for parsing date strings in python alone because everyone wrote one when the standard first appeared, all more-or-less with the same name, and even though a clear winner eventually emerged, its name still sounds like all the other packages'... and moreover i think this whimsy does exist in the wild. do you still <depend on google-collections? noo, we use guava now. did apt-get (yeah, the thing with "super-cow-powers") just decide i need libpdf-extra? noo, zathura depends on poppler. tools like pip and apt-cache provide a description field where greppable stuff like xml, pdf, and rfc3339 can appear for a reason: an xml library's name need not contain "xml".
* well-timed yo-momma-so-fat jokes will always be in style
* whimsy in the ecosystem is ok as long as it doesn't impede functionality. indeed, in some cases, a little added whimsy might help (human) memory in some hot spots: rfc3339-somethingorother is one example of a library that i'd like to have renamed "Nikogiri". there are like half-a-dozen of these little 100-line libraries for parsing date strings in python alone because everyone wrote one when the standard first appeared, all more-or-less with the same name, and even though a clear winner eventually emerged, its name still sounds like all the other packages'... and moreover i think this whimsy does exist in the wild. do you still <depend on google-collections? noo, we use guava now. did apt-get (yeah, the thing with "super-cow-powers") just decide i need libpdf-extra? noo, zathura depends on poppler. tools like pip and apt-cache provide a description field where greppable stuff like xml, pdf, and rfc3339 can appear for a reason: an xml library's name need not contain "xml".
* well-timed yo-momma-so-fat jokes will always be in style