I work with open source software a lot and keep coming across weird and funny na
ID: 659536 • Letter: I
Question
I work with open source software a lot and keep coming across weird and funny names for executables, variables, constants and etc. Currently I am wondering why CATALINA_HOME environment variable was named that way? I did a quick search on google with but nothing relative came up. My only guess is that it is named after the island of the shore of south California.
On the related note, very often I find amusing and clever names used in open source programs. One of my favorites are slapd and slurpd executables of OpenLDAP suite. What are your favorite/noteworthy variable/executable names that you have seen in your programming career? Do you think it is OK to name your variables/executables this way, or would you rather see boring but clear names?
PS. This is not really a programming question but I think it somewhat fits in here, according to faq.
Explanation / Answer
I believe it comes as a result of thinking about your applications home directory, which may in turn have been influenced by Unix home directories before that. Typical examples are
JAVA_HOME for the JDK installation directory
MAVEN_HOME for the Maven installation directory
ANT_HOME
CATALINA_HOME because the project name for the servlet engine within the overall Tomcat project was called Catalina
As a general convention for naming environment variables, the _HOME suffix has stood the test of time and so has become generally adopted for new projects that require them.
In terms of my personal favourite names, here's a short list
grep (global regular expression print) is synonymous with search among *nixers
awk (named after the programmers) is great for awkward text manipulation
For more Unix weirdness have a look at this article.