KDE Programs Naming Convention

[Andrew Jarrett]

On Jan 11, 2008 8:10 AM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/01/2008, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> > > Like said, K3B specifically is not memorable.
> >
> > Perhaps it's a cultural thing - I've never had a problem since the first
> > time I used it.  Nobody else here seems to.
>
> It might be. Are you American? From what I've seen, Americans
> typically do not know the meanings of their own first and last names,
> much less the names of their cities, rivers, and other objects. For
> Americans, a name is often a bunch of meaningless letters, nothing
> more. So obviously a program name is no more important than any other
> name.

This is probably why your comment offended some people: it has the
(unintentional) connotation that most Americans are ignorant.

My intent is not to feed the embers, but I just wanted make a
closed-ended statement: ignorance is a universal _human_ trait and not
a _cultural_ one.  Perhaps your country may understand their names
well, but not Spanish, German, Russian, or Native American names.
With America being a "melting-pot" of a tremendous amount of different
cultural backgrounds, it is often hard to understand all names.  Most
people I know would be able to at least make an educated guess as to
the background of a name (i.e. "San Francisco" -> Spanish).  I just
don't want you to walk away feeling that a certain _culture_ is
inherently ignorant.  All humans are inherently ignorant.

I know you weren't trying to offend anyone with your observation.  I
just wanted to make some clarifications.

Andrew

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