On Tue, 1 Jan 2008 18:30:53 +0100, Jeff P. wrote:
OK, from what I see in the replies so far, it would seem that
ActiveRecord owes its name to the design pattern of the same name, so
perhaps it was not DHH who found himself in a suit one day.
Did most of the other many uses of the root word “action” in naming
things in development environments arise from a contagion of this one
pattern name?
I remember noticing this, and I remember reading somewhere (on the
Internet, so it must be true) that it’s something of a coincidence.
ActiveRecord, as others have said, is based on the ActiveRecord pattern.
ActionPack (which I suspect, with no evidence, may have been originally
just one thing and then later split into ActionController and
ActionView)
is, well, a pack of routines that deal with actions (as in MVC
controller
actions).
Ditto ActionWebService. And I imagine, at that point, you just start
naming everything with A.
We do go through fun naming trends, memes and snowclones in programming.
There was a while at AOL where everything was this-man and that-man
(short
for manager); naturally this ended up at RAINMAN. Microsoft, as someone
else pointed out, went both ActiveCrazy and X-Crazy for a while with
ActiveX. Apple had MacEverything. UNIX has all sorts of memes and
snowclones: recursive acronyms, animals, etc.
When I was fighting spam, we already had SpamJammer, and needed a server
to
cancel the accounts of spammers; SpamHammer was a natural. Then we
needed
something to deal with large floods, so of course that beget SpamDammer.
Then I started working on a DSL (though I’d never heard the term)
specifically for the postmaster group. Naturally, it had to be called
SpamGrammar.
Naming stuff is fun.
–
Jay L. |
Boston, MA | My character doesn’t like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://www.jay.fm | - Kristoffer
