Reading the comments, I get the impression that many people are somewhat lacking perspective.
I've been writing software professionally for more than 25 years, > 30 years in total. gnuplot has been around all that time. Developed in an academic environment, people probably (certainly) had other things to do than argue about name comparisons to other projects. And nobody cared.
There are things that are not an invariant of time. And frankly - open source along with the ideological battle over it is certainly one of those things. There were times with a much healthier way of dealing with zealots (Oh, this will cost me karma, but fortunately I don't care :-)
Stallman speaks English, French, Spanish, and “somewhat flawed” Indonesian. — certainly he could not understand the difference in Japanese between that and saying that the two are unrelated?
That is what I inferred, but it seems a bit ungentlemanly to jump to that conclusion after merely picking “GNU” and “gnuplot” up in a sentence and nothing more, which is what most likely happened.
In context of adding burden of having someone to translate for you in Japanese, the statement he made seems good enough and to the point.
Maybe you are far too pre-assumtpive that there was any ill effect, or even ill intent, in the statement being made, especially if the same fact is accounted for in gnuplot FAQ.
You can have a very low level of understanding in a language, as in no more than a few hours of experience, and understand what people are talking about. You don't get the details or have the most basic conversation, but you can piece together the few words you understand.
It is a cautionary tale: never assume that because someone doesn't speak your language, he won't get it if you are bad mouthing him.
Here "blah blah, Stallman, blah GNU blah blah gnuplot" is enough for some not skilled in blah to understand what is going on.
Indonesia is a big and varied country, with some delightful food, amazing scenery and incredible historical sites (e.g. borobudur).
Other than anything else, I think your rather vile comment says more about you than Stallman or any other visitor to Indonesia.
The kind of very thinly veiled accusation you are making has a habit of sticking - it might be wise before making comments like this if you first imagine how you would feel if someone made a baseless accusation like this about you.
Which is weird because Indonesia is not known for sex tourism. Westerners do not come to Indonesia for sex as there are other sex tourism friendly countries out there. Middle-easterners might come to Indonesia for sex by exploiting a legal loophole (contract marriages), but it's a very minor operation compared to other more legitimate tourism activities. It is a major source of sex trafficking though.
> If you have to keep correcting people about your product's name
What product? It was created by two people in a lab that didn't know whether it would ever have more than a dozen users. Gnuplot as a name is fine imho, barely anyone cares whether it's a GNU project or not. JavaScript still has Java in the name and all you see about it are jokes.
Yeah, but pronouncing TeX "tek" is a bit of a shibboleth among mathematicians. The use of Greek letters is common enough in math papers to make it a natural inference (it's not an English "X", it's a capital Greek χ [0])—at least within the field. And if you don't know it, when one of your professors explains it to you you'll feel like they let you in on a little secret.
WTF. There's probably a lot of things in the world for which most users have talked to someone who has read the manual. But did the authors expect PNG to belong in this league?
I have some friends who strongly assert only the "jif" pronunciation is correct and the "gif" pronunciation is incorrect due to the stated intention of the creator of the format. I can't wait to experience their transition from PNG to "ping" when they learn they've been "mispronouncing" it all along. I wonder if I can convince them to use aluminium?
Wait, but an argument from original intent on aluminum/aluminium would go towards using aluminum [0]. That was the original published name, and the change to "-ium" only happened shortly after. We could go even further on that route and argue that the entire pattern of ending metals in "-ium" rather than "-um" is a neologism based on a misunderstanding. Of the classical metals [1] such as gold (aurum), silver (argentum), lead (plumbum), none of them end in "-ium". So where does that come from?
The best explanation I've heard is that it comes from the timeline of when different metals were discovered [2], back in the 1700s. Magnesium was discovered, and was named after Magnesia, a region in Greece. Basically, "magnesi-" + "-um". Then Barium was discovered, and was named from the Greek "baryta", meaning "heavy". Molybdenum followed the "-um" trend, and "tungsten"/"wolfram" ignored the discussion altogether.
And now we get to the first mistake. Tellurium was named from the Greek "tellus", and should have been called "tellurum". Instead, by analogy from magnesium and barium, the suffix "-ium" was added instead. Strontium came next, after the town of Strontian. This reinforced the trend of the "-ium" suffix, even though it came from "stronti-" + "-um". By the time Zirconium was discovered from the mineral "zircon", the association was cemented. So many metals had ended with "-ium" by sheer coincidence, that people assumed that that was the correct Latin suffix.
Bringing it back to the "aluminum" vs "aluminium", this means that there's neither authorial intent nor historical consistency in the use of "aluminium". I'm fine if people think it sounds better, and argue from that, but for the love of all that is holy, people need to quit pretended that it has any more validity or correctness to it.
I don't think it has more authority or correctness. That's part of the joke. I've actually read various incarnations of this argument on the internet (mostly carried out on Reddit), and at this point I consider it to be somewhat of a meme. What I remember from all of the times I've seen it brought up is that some international standards committee declared and it to be "aluminium" and so some internet denizens (especially Europeans who already tend to pronounce it that way) proudly declare this to be the authoritative be-all-end-all resolution to the subject, whereas the other side (typically those speaking American English) remind everyone that the person who made the original discovery considers "aluminum" to be correct.
Why I am grouping "gif", "png", and "alumin[i]um" together here is that people consider some nebulous authority to be the prescriber of all things pronunciation. I personally think that pronunciation is derived from how it is commonly spoken, and not the other way around. Hence its inclusion in my playful ribbing. If I appeal to the correct authority, can I make them change their pronunciation? Maybe it wasn't very funny.
Ah, got it. I thought that the joke was that you were tricking them into using a less favorable pronunciation on the basis of some perceived authority, rather than the joke being that there would be such an authority at all.
Other than friendly banter over a beer I've never given af how someone pronounced as long as they used one of the commonly "accepted" versions. Also never heard -anyone- call png "ping"
When I was at university there was a discount food store in that city called Matex (mat is Swedish for food). Me and my study friends we pronounced the store as MaTeX similar as LaTeX instead of the normal eks sound at then end, techies giggled and everyone else looked confused.
When David DeWitt (of "DeWitt Clause" fame) introduced SQL in while teaching CS564, he made it clear that SQL was pronounced as three letters.
I recall him saying that Sequel was a distinct language. The info I can find on SEQUEL today suggests he was trying to distinguish modern (1994) versions of SQL from the early versions. Or maybe he was afraid someone in a suit[1] would show up to admonish him for improper use of a trademark[2].
S-Q-L is a lame normie version, if you are really a leet haxor you know about the obscure information that it's sequel.
I hate that I always have to look these things up to not look out of place. For example nginx is engine-ex not en-jinks. They often seem intentionally hard or ambiguous to pronounce.
It's kind of ironic because I only learned the "correct" pronunciation when I got a boring office job at an American tech company. When I used the n00b pronunciation I was in college, and way more of a 1337 h4x0r.
So as a shibboleth it mostly functions to distinguish those who discuss tech in English with their colleagues from those who do not. The latter group is quite diverse; it includes self-taught people, people communicating mostly in writing, and people who speak other languages than English with their colleagues.
> For example nginx is engine-ex not en-jinks. They often seem intentionally hard or ambiguous to pronounce.
I think it's a side-effect of the desire to create a name for your project that is both short and unique.
That is kind of funny to me because where I live the S-Q-L vs sequel divide is more along the linux/microsoft divide.
Meaning if you encounter someone here that pronounces SQL as sequel you probably found a DotNet developer or at least someone that primarily focuses on Microsoft technologies.
I have only ever heard it pronounced as "S-Q-L". When I had a customer on the phone going on about their "sequel" years ago I genuinely had no idea what they were on about, only only when they said (after a few minutes) "Microsoft sequel" did it finally click it was SQL.
I mostly have a background in Linux/Unix-y stuff, and I've hardly ever heard someone say "sequel" since, so this seems about right.
Not that I care either way, pronounce things however you like, but it sure can be confusing!
> Apache is an awkward one, because it's a Spanish loanword from Nahuatl
Probably North American native language (though there is a less-accepted theory of entirely-Spanish origin), but almost certainly not Nahuatl. Per Wikipedia, the dominant theories are Zuni and Yavapai.
The correct pronunciation of Apache is "a patchy" as in "a patchy HTTPD server". The pronunciation of the Spanish and Nahuatl etymological origins of the other side of the pun are irrelevant.
Unless you read the very next paragraph on the wikipedia article...
> Brian Behlendorf, one of the Apache's creators, asserted that the origins of Apache were not a pun, stating:
> > The name literally came out of the blue. I wish I could say that it was something fantastic, but it was out of the blue. I put it on a page and then a few months later when this project started, I pointed people to this page and said: "Hey, what do you think of that idea?" ... Someone said they liked the name and that it was a really good pun. And I was like, "A pun? What do you mean?" He said, "Well, we're building a server out of a bunch of software patches, right? So it's a patchy Web server." I went, "Oh, all right." ... When I thought of the name, no. It just sort of connotated: "Take no prisoners. Be kind of aggressive and kick some ass."
So, no, it's based on a stereotype of a group of tribes indigenous to North America. The pun endures because the indigenous culture did not.
I pronounce it "squeal like a pig". "Squeal" is as good a pronunciation for SQL as "sequel", and indeed better because it saves a syllable. But after "squeal", who can resist adding "like a pig"?
"as good as", I guess, other than the point of language is to transmit ideas, and if you're the only one that says something in a certain way for some pedantic "it's as good as" reason, you've failed. I guess reasonable people can disagree.
The correct pronunciation hardly matters for the marketability of the product. — it is usually understandable.
In Linux' case, Linus Torvalds has said that he doesn't really care and admits that he instinctively pronounces it differently depending on the language that he's speaking.
Right, so whoever wrote the software decided to give it a name identical to an existing English word, but would then balk at it being 'mispronounced'? If the developer didn't care enough about avoiding confusion then why the hell should I?
Ah, glancing at your profile I think you're hitting the traditional English problem of pronouncing letters which aren't there :) "To be forced to sawr into such rawr meat should be against the lawr"
It's nicely counterpointed by the other habit of not pronouncing letters which are there, like in Worchestershire.
I always say latex just because it makes pedants grit their teeth, and then just for fun randomly pronounce it correctly. A lot of CS people need to learn to chill a bit.
Yeah but in English, if everyone pronounces it wrong and you wait 100 years (now more like 20), it will become the default pronunciation via a special rule used by speakers and codified nowhere.
The first release of gnuplot was only three years after the GNU operating system was first announced to start development, and long ere it became widely known.
Look a bit lower in the FAQ, apparently they were at some point associated with the FSF. Their license also seems copy left to me. So the name wasn't that wrong and since most end users don't care about these details it probably doesn't make sense to rename it now.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. The name is a pun on the name of the gnu animal. Just because GNU also made the same pun doesn't mean they are related, or that they have anything to do with each other.
gnuplot's history goes back to 1986, when GNU was in its infancy. The name was fine then, and is probably fine now.
> Their license also seems copy left to me.
The license is interesting! I'm surprised they've stuck with it. But yeah, it does appear copyleftish.
Naming things so that people can try to understand what they are and do from the name is the most fundamental act of UX. I feel like too much software goes for a cute brand name, marketing approach.
What is a Linux? Android? Google? We are not living in a neatly planned world, can’t just name things General Kernel(tm), General Mobile OS and Search Engine. And people like to give names to even inanimate objects, it is marketing, but at the same time you do remember them better that way. Would you rather start Image Editor, or Photoshop? In the former case it may very well just be Paint, while you do know what to expect from the latter. Also, should we as well get rid of icons/logos?
As a product name, MacOS did not exist until version 7.5 if I recall correctly. Prior to that, it was Macintosh System Software, the system software, or simply System <version number>. Neither icon, logo, nor typeface were associated with the system software throughout most of that period. That seems very out of place for a company that is very much conscious of the value of brand image.
Quite possibly. The 80's and 90's were an awfully a long time ago, so I can only refresh my memory from what's on the screen and in the manuals.
For what it's worth, the about box on my older PowerBook shows "System Software 7.1" and the manual simply says "system software" (i.e. not a proper noun).
There must be other examples, but you're right in the famous case of Prince changing his name to an abstract symbol to get round a contractual issue he was having with his record label. Apparently journalists started saying "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" though apparently it didn't stick? Unfortunately I'm not enough of a Prince fan to know what his fans did?
It stuck enough. I'm not really a Prince fan, but "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" is what people called him for pretty much my whole childhood. He didn't use the name "Prince" 1993-2000, but it's my recollection that a lot of people kept calling him "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" well in to the mid 200x's. Sure, eventually people went back to calling him just "Prince" once he was using that name again, but "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" absolutely did stick for a number of years.
There is also a band named , or something to that effect. I used to have quite a nice album from them but I can't find it now (I'm not even sure if those are the correct Unicode block symbols).
I think intentionally being obscure is kind of the point for a lot of these things.
A good example of a product with impossible name is the 1726 book "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships". Everyone just calls it Gulliver's Travels.
“ After the change, Warner Bros. had to mail out floppy disks to news organizations featuring a font that allowed for reproduction of the new Prince symbol, because the symbol itself cannot be replicated in the fonts most publications use.”
I am a thankful user of Gnuplot. As some before me mentioned, the naming history was complex. What is more important is that the developers provided - and still support - an excellent program that we may freely use under a very reasonable license.
It probably doesn’t matter enough. There’s limited downside to people thinking this is an official GNU project. This is a minor entry on the FAQ, not a Crusade Against Wrongness like “GNU vs GNU/Linux vs GNU+Linux”.
>... the name "gnuplot" was actually a compromise. I wanted to call it "llamaplot" and Colin wanted to call it "nplot." We agreed that "newplot" was acceptable but, we then discovered that there was an absolutely ghastly pascal program of that name that the Computer Science Dept. occasionally used. I decided that "gnuplot" would make a nice pun and after a fashion Colin agreed.
Sounds like a change to camel plot (cplot) might make more sense (another even-toed ungulate, not easily mistaken for a gnu)? ;)
They don’t say “Gnuplot” is wrong. They even include themselves (“many of us”) in those people that don’t want to start sentences and title words with lower case. My reading of that paragraph is that while “GNUplot” is definitely incorrect, “Gnuplot” may naturally occur due to capitalization, just like with any lower-case noun.
gnuplot is a command-driven plotting program. It can be used interactively to plot functions and data points in both two- and three-dimensional plots in many different styles and many different output formats. Gnuplot can also be used as a scripting language to automate generation of plots. It is designed primarily for the visual display of scientific data. gnuplot is copyrighted, but freely distributable; you don’t have to pay for it. You are welcome to download the source code.”
If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere.
> If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere.
If you read closely, you’ll notice that only “x” level headings use title case, “x.y” level headings use sentence case; there is no clear instance of “gnuplot”, capitalized or not, in title case anywhere in the document. The only arguable case is the page header “gnuplot FAQ”, but since it is sui generis there is no way other than inferring from capitalization in the rest of the document of telling whether its titlecase or just the preferred labelling of the product followed by “FAQ” (and the context suggests the latter).
You see people use "Gnuplot" quite a bit because many of us have an aversion to starting a sentence with a lower case letter, even in the case of proper nouns and titles. gnuplot is not […]
Most of us don’t care about forcing the first letter to be always lowercase, and in fact feel it’s a lost cause. But I agree that after such an explicit clarification I would expect to see “gnuplot” everywhere in the official documentation, except for this particular excerpt and when they refer to “GNUplot”. Otherwise it is clearly inconsistent with what they are explaining.
Yes, I also read the body text after the numbered heading in the prior excerpt, which makes two different choices in sentence-starting position in sentence case. But what I was responding to was the inference of a rule bases on usage in “title font” (which seems to be a reference to title case), not a complaint about the inconsistent use in sentence case. Hence, the except you provide here isn't really germane to anything I've said.
> If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere.
The section titles are in sentence case, not title case. You would not expect it to be capitalised unless it were the first word of the title. The inconsistency in that paragraph is in the first sentence.
Because it's the correct way to spell it. Names are spelled with an uppercase letter in the beginning and all the other letters are lowercase. "I saw John" vs. "I saw john" vs. "I saw JOHN". First one is correct. Even if John tells you "My name is spelled with a lower case j". Or if John writes: "this orange thing is a kaRROT", it's still a carrot.
You can write whatever you want. You can also write "Tis is me bunni and he likes KArRoTs" and have a lot of friends agree with you that's the correct spelling. And it is still generally considered wrong :)
There are many names that do not follow your rule, and generally speaking I'd find it very rude if I told you my name, and you'd go "let me fix that to the _correct_ spelling". For example a name as Angus MacGyver, or Armand de la Cour. Both don't follow your rule. I don't see why that wouldn't apply to brand names as well.
Wikipedia often rejects corporate case styling and uses the sane "first letter upper case, others lowercase" for some brands. For example Wikipedia writes Nvidia instead of NVIDIA, although the company always capitalizes its name without exception.
No, Wikipedia does not make the judgement call on whether to "reject" corporate case styling on its own, it follows what is "in widespread use":
> Follow standard English text formatting and capitalization practices, even if the trademark owner considers nonstandard formatting "official", as long as this is a style already in widespread use, rather than inventing a new one: (But see exception below under § Trademarks that begin with a lowercase letter.)
> use: Time, Kiss, Asus, Sony Mobile. (Capitalize IKEA, IBM, as acronyms/initialisms.)
One thing that entry does not cover is all lower-case names. Although a couple things I looked up (gnuplot, xkcd), Wikipedia does seen to respect all lower-case. I'm not sure how many companies actually have all lower-case names--even if their logo is all lower-case. And my observation is that even many projects that are nominally lower-case, aren't very consistent about it as in the current example.
> Follow standard English text formatting and capitalization practices, even if the trademark owner considers nonstandard formatting "official", as long as this is a style already in widespread use, rather than inventing a new one: (But see exception below under § Trademarks that begin with a lowercase letter.)
> use: Time, Kiss, Asus, Sony Mobile. (Capitalize IKEA, IBM, as acronyms/initialisms.)
Not sure. There's GNU after all. Wikipedia's "arbitrary" standard is actually pretty common in my experience. But I'm not sure I could come up with a coherent explanation as to why.
GNU is an acronym, that's fine. But if they insist on Nvidia, they should also insist on Xkcd (it's not an acronym, just an unpronounceable artificial word).
And radar is an acronym too and it's not commonly capitalized although SCSI is. And, often, Fortran, not FORTRAN. I'm not making a case for how things should be. I'm just observing how they commonly are in style guides, etc.
I think part of it is a general stylistic distaste for having "unnecessary" caps. See also general shift away from "Open Source," "Big Data," and the like.
Do people actually write eBay? It looks as dated as eMail.
iPhone is definitely an example of marketing winning over grammar, but it's not a given. Plenty of style guides indicate "our company name is to be written in all caps", when they want to stand out, which the rest of us happily ignore.
In my experience, publications and the like do tend to respect the capitalization and other choices of a company/project/etc. with perhaps some exceptions like the ! in Yahoo! and perhaps all caps as in NVIDIA. In the case of Wikipedia, I'd go so far as to say that they're simply wrong if they're ignoring the actual way a company name is officially styled.
Mind you, I'm not necessarily a big fan of case-sensitive everything but here we are.
I can mostly agree with people's names, especially stuff like cultural variations or things that are basically name prepositions like de/Mac/o etc. That said if you decided to change your name to "JOHN SMITH" don't be surprised if that decision was less respected and you were referred to as "John Smith" following capitalisation norms.
Companies don't get even that assumption for me, sure I'll use "iPhone" because they've won that one and it's the cultural expectation, but the only time I'm using "FREE NOW" is to criticise that decision
Maybe. Probably. But in practice no one really cares other than editors and pedants. I'd probably only bother if I was showcasing something to people from that particular entity.
People are perfectly free to spell their names however they want. Good luck to them in getting everyone else to spell them that way, though. And even more so, good luck not having other people think they're being pretentious wankers.
And even in cases where the lowercase starting letter is somewhat accepted, the start of the sentence rule is still left untouched by most writers. Iphones come to mind.
In my native language, the general advice from our language council is to NOT listen to corporation’s rules. You would write “an iphone”, and casing as usual. In fact you wouldn’t really use iphone at all, but smartphone. The idea is that the name casing rules are for showing respect, and an inanimate product does not deserve the same respect as a person.
OTOH you would say Apple though, but I guess that avoids some obvious ambiguity
I don't know what your native language is, could it be Swedish? In Sweden, media consistently write Iphone, because it's a name, and names start with upper case.
As you mentioned, what the marketing department says about the case of letters in the name does not affect this generic recommendation.
Of course, you'll find a lot of people writing it in accordance with the marketing style, bit typically you'll see media follow the Swedish spelling rules.
> In fact you wouldn’t really use iphone at all, but smartphone
The sentence "Smartphone is a phone made by Apple" (or maybe "A smartphone is a phone made by Apple") would have a very different and wrong meaning though, so that doesn't make much sense to me.
To be fair, they mostly advise against GNUplot, and mention Gnuplot because of the aversion to start sentences with lowercase (which is also where they use it with uppercase).
Google is not an authoritative source on pronouncing words in English. In fact, there are no authoritative sources on pronouncing words in English.
There are references for common usages, but anything that is mutually intellegable is not wrong, even if it's not common usage or listed in the references.
Plenty of people pronounce the g, and plenty of people would know what you mean if you said I graphed this with g'new plot, and not if you said you graphed it with new plot. So, I for one, would prefer if you countinue to voice the g.
There are more things to be named than good names, and also what constitutes a good name depends on our individual perception (prior experiences, cultural background, neurological disposition, etc.).
Looking at it from the other side: Why are we so hung up on names? It’s not that we shouldn’t, but it’s an interesting topic. A computer doesn’t care as long as a name is syntactically unambiguous and fits the lengths constraints.
Because it's hard. There are even professionals who think all day long how to name things (advertisement and marketing industry). A little open source project doesn't have the resources for that.
Names should come last (when everything else is known) but usually they come first (when most things are yet undecided). Once set, the name gets quite a lot of inertia and is hard to change. While naming things is hard, renaming things often isn't worth it.
This is why I hate these stupid OSS naming schemes. Screwing with capitalisation serves no function other than as a shibboleth - signalling that the devs belong to the free software tribe.
I avoid software with dumb-ass case-sensitive names precisely for this reason. Look at the confusion, the time wasted on this topic. Why should it matter if it's octave vs. Octave? Normal users aren't case-sensitive, they just want to get on with their task. It just points to devs with the wrong priorities.
The FAQ says gnuplot used to be distributed by the FSF. So, perhaps it used to be GPL-licensed? I wonder what changed... is there really that much money to be had from forcing derivative source code to only be distributed as patches over the original? I don't get it.
Uh, while that was informative, more important is IMHO that gnuplot is a great tool and I like to take the opportunity to express my gratitude to all who contributed.
Don't forget text plotting, that's the hard part. The technical challenge is not huge, but the amount of small and "easy" features a good plotting lib needs is huge.
It’s easy if you keep it simple, your data is regular, and you don’t handle the multitude of corner cases. Doing it properly is about as difficult as processing Unicode correctly, which is to say quite bloody hard.
Lol if you have tons of free time on your hands. I'd like to see your replacement for gnuplot that has all the same capabilities. HackerNews will be awaiting your contribution!
I've been writing software professionally for more than 25 years, > 30 years in total. gnuplot has been around all that time. Developed in an academic environment, people probably (certainly) had other things to do than argue about name comparisons to other projects. And nobody cared.
There are things that are not an invariant of time. And frankly - open source along with the ideological battle over it is certainly one of those things. There were times with a much healthier way of dealing with zealots (Oh, this will cost me karma, but fortunately I don't care :-)