What's the deal with 'n'?

Why does it seem lately that every new project out there has a name that's prefixed by 'n'? nUnit, nTeam, nGallery, and now nContract. What gives? Is that as creative about naming as developers can get? These names make me nBored.

But then, you can't forget some other famous single letter prefixes. Apple was denied a patent trademark (thanks Tim) for putting an 'i' before their names (no, not really), and who can forget xWindows, and our old favorite, QBasic.

So what if someone comes up with a digital replacement for the optic nerve. Would they call it iEye?

</end rant>

9 Comments

  • Yes that’s as creative as I can get. What can I say I have no creativity, I admit ;)



    Also as Keith said there are similar tools iContract, jContractor, etc. which are similar tools and I would like people who know about those tools to have an idea right of the bat what nContract is.

  • Wes,



    Just so you know, I wasn't assaulting your creativity. I can understand your reasoning. It was more of a commentary on the industry as a whole and not an assault on your personally.

  • CURSES!!! FOILED AGAIN!!!

  • &lt;bitch-slap mode=on&gt;



    Well, an &quot;n&quot; prefix is certainly preferable: better than products that have that .NET suffix, e.g., DeadBolt.NET, GenX.NET.



    I WAS going to post something about another recently posted snippet, named &quot;RegistryPlus&quot;, due it not just simply being named &quot;nRegistry&quot;...as it should be! (to distinguish it from jRegistry, of course!)...but I refrained. ;)



    &lt;/bitch-slap&gt;



    Good luck getting the rest of your servers back up! (I ran into &quot;dead-air&quot; when trying to view the DeadBolt webpages... Oy!) May the nForce be with you!

  • It's not only uncreative but causes alphabetic indexes to get everything lumped together under N.



    It's the same lazy scheme used by KDE kWhatever, Gnome gWhatever, Apple iWhatever and Java jWhatever tools.



    Very dull.

  • I regard it as smart and economical, now that you mention it.

  • Apple was not denied a patent, they were denied a trademark. Sorry, just a little pet peeve of mine :)

  • Robert, it could be much worse. Just take at the LINUX folks: &quot;Ubunto Hoary Hedgehugger&quot;, &quot;GIMP&quot;, &quot;Gentoo&quot;.



    Our names border on boring. Their names border (and quite often cross into) frutiness.

  • Steve - Ha! Too funny. You're right, most of my names suck too.

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