It's all started with A

They stick you with those names, those labels - ‘rebel’ or whatever; whatever they like to use. Because they need a label; they need a name. They need something to put the price tag on the back of-Johnny Depp

Read about Linux yesterday. With all the OpenOffice stuff I'm working on, just thought I read about the free OS (operating system). I was reading through Wikipedia on the whole penguin maskot OS and a thought cross my mind, among other things that set Linux apart from all other OS is the totally creative names for all the version they came up. Well okay we had Microsoft with XP, 2000 and Vista (they are finally catching up on the naming game coming up with name like Vista).

But none of it can beat Linux Ubuntu,SUSE, Fedora, Debian and of course the more popular Red Hat. There are few others. Anyhow in the world of computing coming up with names are not that hard. No body really check the grammar or meaning. Everthing is about standing up and delivering the your service. Take us for example, you have a word file, you change it a bit and your saved it under different name, you change another part and you saved it to another name. You might not realize it, but if you really sit down in front of your computer and start checking each and every file you keep, I bet almost 75% of it is not something you use anymore or just a duplicate of other files with different name. The bigger space you've got the more junk you keep.

Back to the naming in computing, well it's been a tradition that is hard to get rid off. It's been rooting from the 50's since the first computer was build. Take programming language for example...it started with Assembly Language, then there were COBOL, FOTRAN and LISP, then they came up with language called 'Simula' (which I think was a short form for simulator) because it supports object oriented programming, then there was 'SmallTalk' (get real....these guys were really passionate about computer or what...smalltalk huh? ).

After that they seem out of idea and came out with just C, then came 'Prolog' and a few other bunch before 'C++' came out. United States being United States used language called 'Ada' for the sake of their defence system. (Luckily Malaysia is quite far behind at that time...or else our most brilliant would come out with language called 'Tiada' since we do have the tendencies to emulate other people...whether it's the flag design or the national anthem).

Then came the internet and a whole new bunch of languages with equally proposterous name, we 've got PHP, ASP, HTML, XML, JAVA, Perl, Phyton etc...etc and the list keep expanding.

But then think of it like the world w live in, each and different part of the world have their own unique mother's tongue and we learn to understand each other despite the obvious hindrance in understanding. Programmer being human just used what we all learnt from the very beginning. We see, we point, and we name it...it's all for the sake of communication.

We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box-a bright guy