Resist the urge to name your software project “simple” or “easy”
Of course you want it to be simple. But software tends to evolve until its original name is but a forgotten dream.
If your project is successful, then by the time most people use it, it may not be Simple anymore. And its name may then be comparable to telling your users that its functions and purpose are Intuitively Obvious to Even The Most Casual Observer.
notes
- for examples here’s a search showing thousands of popular simple projects but I’m also talking about protocols like Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
- for some reason, projects named “utils” (as in, java.util package or python utils) seem to be immune to this type of problem in my experience, and are often remarkably stable in purpose and easy to work with
- obligatory reference to the old joke via Martin Fowler about how difficult it is to name things