Remix.run Logo
▲ WillAdams 2 hours ago

When worldwideweb.app was first being developed an the RFCs and so forth for web servers and protocols were being discussed, one of the sticking point was what to call a URL --- the initial suggestion was "Universal Resource Locator", but the argument was made that users and writers were not librarians and that the distributed nature would preclude a given web page having a universally agreed-upon location and name, so instead the present "Uniform Resource Locator" was adopted.

What if there was a code sharing site where it was unambiguous what a given snippet of code would be named and where it would be stored, so that a user could just browse it and find a list of implementations for a given problem?

This of course runs up against one what John Ousterhout notes is one of the most difficult problems in computer science --- naming things --- in his book:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy...

I've tried to do it on a small-scale with my own work, storing bits of (la).tex code in a single file, but on reviewing it, I'll often find that I have written a given solution a second time and given the macro a slightly different name....