Indonesian names for software projects/products
Lately I've been choosing Indonesian names for my software projects/codenames, beginning with Sah, and then Rinci/Perinci, Riap, Serabi. Others will certainly follow. These names are words straight from the dictionary, but I plan to extend to proper nouns like island names (we have 17k+ of those!), characters from traditional stories, words from dialects (why, we have hundreds of living dialects too!), famous people, and so on.
The first reason for this is running out of good, distinct English names. Since we have already come to the point of picking household names like "cucumber" and "tasty pie", why not use these household names from a different language altogether.
The second reason is to catch up. Why should non-Indonesians have all the fun picking Indonesian names? :-) This blog post will also lists software projects/products with Indonesian names. I will separate the list as two, those started by Indonesians and those which are not. I will add to the list when I spot new ones.
Projects not started by Indonesians
- Java, obviously. It is the most populous island in Indonesia, albeit not the largest. So populous that people like to say that it's sinking such and such centimeters per year [citation needed].
- Sumatra. Another big island (bigger than Java, as a matter of fact), northwest of Java. I don't know why the author chose Sumatra as the name. Perhaps picking a smaller island is more fitting for a PDF reader that stresses on small footprint.
- Jakarta. The much-beloved, much-hated capital of Indonesia, although much like the project, I'd like to see the capital retired and moved somewhere else :-)
Projects started by Indonesians
Only notable ones will be listed. Unless specified otherwise, I am not involved in or endorsing these projects in anyway.
- Qu. What a pity, just when SMS and Alay takes over the online world, this language (started in 2002) has to be dead.
- BAIK. Another programming language.
- Nusa (formerly Batak). Yet another programming language. I actually like the former name better, packs more punch :-)
- BlankOn. A cute traditional hat, though a fedora probably can cover your head better in rain/snow :-)
A programmer (mostly Perl 5 nowadays).
My CPAN ID: SHARYANTO. I'm sedusedan on perlmonks. My twitter is stevenharyanto (but I don't tweet much). Follow me on github: sharyanto.
I hope that doesn't mean you're going to stop naming your modules sensibly and take the ruby approach, where you can't figure out from the name what the thing does.
I liked this post. +1. Thanks! Indonesian sounds sonorous to me. I feel like there are a lot of vowels. Its also frustrating that I have to consider adding 'ify' and 'str' to the end of my domain names.
I still want to call a program of mine Mataglap, but I haven't written anything yet for which it would be an appropriate name.
I know, that irks me too. Yesterday I read this paragraph from metric_fu's web page (emphasis mine): "Metric_fu is a set of rake tasks that make it easy to generate metrics reports. It uses Saikuro, Flog, Flay, Rcov, Reek, Roodi, Churn, RailsBestPractices, Subversion, Git, and Rails built-in stats task to create a series of reports. It's designed to integrate easily with CruiseControl.rb by placing files in the Custom Build Artifacts folder."
But to each his own. For insiders those names are clear as a bell, I guess.
Me, I'm following Miyagawa style. Everything is still Perl-style except when the name gets too long or too generic.