JIFTLOG-NARADIT!

March 2nd, 2004 • Rants

For the wondering ones, JIFTLOG-NARADIT stands for:

JIFTLOG-NARADIT Is: For The Love Of God, Not Another Recursive Acronym Damn IT!

Browsing through freshmeat.net and SourceForge I found a huge amount of projects, all named with some kind of a recursive acronym. Projects like Zinf, Zina, Wine, Qingy, NINO, and all those XINY projects, simply drive me nuts! I mean I can understand differences in points of view, I can understand that project X didn’t like what project Y did and they forked, but I can’t really understand this tremendous amount of recursive acronyms.

Alright, now some people did it long ago, like GNU, they even pushed it to an extent of letting Hurd to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms, then some people followed that tradition thinking it was really “cool”. Some of them did it for a reason, take PHP for example, when the project first started, it was merely a set of Perl scripts to run a Personal Homepage (PHP), now that the project has grown in size, it isn’t personal anymore, they need a new name, and it’s not very easy to come with a name to suite PHP. But still, that’s no excuse for the newer projects to use that “cool” recursiveness.

I’m not going to turn this into a rant about how there are a lot of open-source project that do the exact same thing only a different way (that’ll be the XINY syndrome), but I didn’t seem to notice any successful commercial product that used such a naming scheme. These acronyms seem to only exist among open-source projects, and not just any projects, only “cool” ones, I don’t think that big open-source projects very much like these names. Linux was named after Linus Torvalds, and I don’t recall reading anywhere that Linux stands for something like Linux Is Not a Unix eXterminator (actually Linux was Linus’s nickname, but that’s another story). Perl doesn’t stand for Perl Extraction and Reporting Language, it wasn’t even meant to stand for anything at first, and so on…

One might argue that such projects are unique in their goals, which isn’t always true, while XINY projects are mostly alternatives to other projects, yet somehow those other projects managed to get their names straight, they didn’t have to use recursive acronyms, and please don’t get me started on “Yet Another Something” names!

Conclusion: Next time any of you developers wants to start a project, please consult a professional, get yourself an identity, and try to get a life! Recursive acronyms are bad for health and they might cause severe damage to your projects acceptability. Just think of it when an end-users are searching for certain functionality and they see a project named “This Is Not That”, they’ll just go and take a look at “That” first, at least that’s what I noticed from personal experience. Now with all due respect, I think these acronyms imply weakness in one way or another. I exclude some early projects, back in their time it wasn’t so bad. But now, just stick to something more proffesional.

Mentioned projects that use recursive acronyms:

• Zinf: Zinf Is Not FreeAmp
• Zina: Zina Is Not Andromeda
• Wine: Wine Is Not an emulator
• Qingy: Qingy Is Not Getty
• NINO: NINO Is Not Openview
• XINY: XINY Is Not Y
• GNU: GNU’s Not UNIX
• PHP: PHP Hypertext Preprocessor
• Hurd: Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons
• Hird: Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth

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