Back when I was a Googler, I used to play a little game where I would think of a random word and then check if there was a Google internal project code named for it. It was a bit hard finding stuff that wasn't some system or project, and often there would be multiple ones. I actually found one that I thought would be a nice name and reserved the go link for it, but naming anything after it never panned out, when I finally got to design a system from scratch my manager wanted a boring descriptive name like "consolidated data system" (it was a bit more specific but that was the vibe).

Side note: I noticed that more "boring" and less sexy projects had cooler names a lot of the time, and my theory was that people were compensating for doing unsexy work.

Fun fact: one of the first 10 bugs filed on the Go programming language was "Hey, I've been working on a programming language named Go for the last 10 years, please pick another name." https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

Too small for Google to care about.

You forgot the "and off by one errors"

I would add also hearing this quip every time either of those things come up un conversation.

I've always wondered if he meant coming up with good names or if he meant ensuring that names, however they're chosen, reliably resolve to the named thing.

“There are only two hard things in computer science. Cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.”

You forgot "Off by one errors."

> You should never reach for a language you are not fluent in for a name

I agree, but that still doesn't stop funny name related issues between languages. One of my favourites was Pidora (a Fedora release for the RPI) which caused offence to some Russian speakers.