Where did the name Bison come from anyway?
The history of computers and software is full of nerdy and obscure jokes well beyond the caricatures of exiting vim. Complier compiler (explain that to most people!) to yet another compiler compiler to bison is one of those.
What are your favourite obscure computer nerd jokes?
14 replies
Not so much of a joke as a cute story. There was once a programmer with a dog named Biff who would bark at the mailman every time he delivered the mail. The programmer wrote a program to monitor incoming email and beep when you got a message, and named it biff.
GNU's Not UNIX
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
WINE Is Not an Emulator
Less is more.
my favorite name origin for a bit of software relates to the text editor nano. nano was written as a standalone clone of Pico, as a play on metric prefixes, but Pico is actually Pine compositor, part of Pine, an email client. Pine itself was based on an earlier email client called Elm, and has been attributed as various recursive acronyms such as 'Pine Is Nearly Elm'
A real-life moth was found to be the cause of errors in a computer, popularizing the terms "bug" and "debugging". The culprit was attached to the report as proof:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging#/media/File%3AFirst_Computer_Bug%2C_1945.jpg
While the story is true, it’s not the origin of the terms “bug” and “debugging.” Those terms were already in use in Edison’s time.
What? and I am a programmer 😅
Compiler compiler (cc) -> yet another compiler compiler (yacc) -> bison (because yacc sounds like "yak")
TWAIN, the protocol used in fax machines, comes from Technology Without An Interesting Name.
Edit: aww, wikipedia says that's a myth. I'm leaving it here because it's too good not to be true.
Never ever let facts get in the way of a good story!
PCMCIA: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
cat (as in concatenate)
prints a file to stdout
head & tail print the beginning / end of a file