Friday, February 02, 2007

Win a Book and Help rubinius

Want to help the rubinius team? Want another chance to win a book? Well then, this just might be the post for you!.

Every good open source project relies on good names and other cool stuff to keep it running, and rubinius is no exception. We've been trying to come up with a good name for our C API layer for a while now, but we're still stuck with 'RNI' and that's just not good enough.

Now, we're turning to you, intrepid reader — and we're offering a reward. Here's the deal, I'll take submissions for a better name for the C API until midnight (MST) on February 18th (Chinese New Year) then Evan will pick the best name from the batch. All you need to do to submit a book is to enter it in a comment below, you can submit as many names as you like (you're welcome to submit multiple names per comment). The person who's entry is chosen will win their choice of one of these three books:

The (not so) Fine Print:

  • In the event multiple people submit the same name, the first person to have submitted it will be considered the winner.
  • I'm relying on Amazon's free super saver shipping to get the books to you — if it can't ship to where you live, I'm sorry.
  • Pleas avoid names with previous committments, we really don't want to have to go through the hassle of renaming something after Microsoft sends us a Cease &l Desist letter.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Styx (as in the river not the band, but you get a easy 70-80's rock band choice for all of your presentations).

It was the border between the underworld and the living in Greek mythology.

Of course if you want to be more obscure you could go with Phlegyas, who ferried the souls across the river, probably more appropriate, but a much bigger mouthful.

Anonymous said...

Off the top of my head, some lame suggestions:

crube
crude
cruddy
crabby

Mr. Neighborly said...

Here are my ideas for a name:
Caraf (C And Rubinius Are Friends)
Rancor (Rubinius And Native Code Often Relate)

Call it what you want, but I call it: AWESOME.

Anonymous said...

From my chat tonight:

20:16 < zedas> hey folks, i gots an idea for the C API name
20:17 < zedas> Subtendinous
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/subtend
20:18 < defn52> not bad
20:18 < zedas> "Oh I just did a subtend for that."
20:18 < zedas> "You could probably work up something with
Subtendinous."
20:18 < zedas> and i'm betting it's not trademarked :-)

mr. c said...

Cuz it's obvious and nobody has said it:
RAPIC
or
CRAPI

Also:
RinC as in Ruby w/ inline C
CRinge
CIN

SonOfLilit said...

First, Bacon, because nothing in the Ruby world is named after it yet. And because _why IS an evil Ruby genius.

Perhaps BFG, for Big Freakin' Gun, to keep the evil genius theme. Or Plan, or Doomsdevice, or just Device, or Lobotomy, or Venom, or Octopus (they are SO evil), or...

As you can see, I believe in giving programming projects completely unrelated names. There's a reason: A good unrelated name will stick after very bit of work with the project.

At work, it took only a few days for the whole business unit to talk about Weasel, my small low-impact internship project, just because it's so cute and fuzzy.

If you want a relevant and yet good name you may choose Wig. It is very good simply because it's simple to SWIG, reminding of the most famous project in the area, which means immediate correct connotations for most programmers that hear the name. It also has a LOT of personality by itself as a name. It also has connotations of disguise, which are in place for a project that allows ruby code to behave like code of another language.

And therefore, Mirror is also suggested, also I'm not sure if it's available.

Vex is suggested for sounding right.

Wireplex.

Facepaint.

Ax.

Nexus.

Bonds or Shackles or Binds (for binding to libraries in other languages) or Bridge or Bridges or Talkie or Cable.

Now reread and you will find the one you like.

Daniel Berger said...

I hate to be a killjoy, but why in the world does the C API warrant a separate name?

I think it's just going to confuse people who aren't on the core dev team.

Brendan MacDonell said...

Come to think of it, a simple name like Granite or Bedrock might do the trick to, since it will be more easily understood as being a low-level layer.

Paul (TheGreenZap) Beel said...

Arnie - I thought of this as soon as I looked at RNI. If you read it like this "R-NI"

Carnie - Add a "C" to the first suggestion. CaRNIe

Caper - This means a leap or hop.

Island - I thought of Capri (which means island) first, but it seems to be taken by NASA for something. I thought of this because the C functions you are calling could be the island and they can be reached in some way. Just like an island.

Chaotica - I just liked the sound of this.

Paul (TheGreenZap) Beel said...

I came up with a couple more names that sounded pretty cool. Here they are:

Cloak

Moebius