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Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Meaningful: Choose Two

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 84 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 84 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



Andrew Wilcox wrote:
> If I decide to change the name of my library, perhaps I could release
> a version of the library under the new name and a version under the
> old name which forwards imports to the new library name: [...]

Your post, and Tom Lord's note on the politics of naming, reminded me of
an excellent essay introducing "Zooko's Triangle" [1], laying out the
tradeoffs between decentralization, strong identity, and
human-meaningful naming. (Another short essay vaguely on topic is [4].)

Petnames [2], and in particular some kinds of proposed UI for them [3],
look a bit like the forwarding-of-names mentioned above. Tom Lord's
proposal of using lexical scope to introduce petnames is a very
interesting idea!

Another interesting, but less Schemely, approach to naming is taken by
the experimental language L [5] and its separation of symbols from their
spellings [6].

Cheers,
  Tony

[1] http://www.zooko.com/distnames.html
[2] http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html
[3] http://ciphergoth.livejournal.com/110893.html
[4] http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html
[5] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~tony/L/
[6] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~tony/L/#Protocols%20and%20Default%20Behavior