"Every name is an act of creation — you're literally speaking something into existence."
There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. The joke lands because naming isn't hard the way puzzles are hard — it's hard the way creation is hard. A name arrives before the thing is finished and then quietly decides what the thing is allowed to become.
The clearest case study is sitting on PyPI. The library that became Requests started life as "HTTP for Python that doesn't suck" — a name that defined the work by resentment. The shift to HTTP for Humans wasn't branding; it was a change of gravitational center. Every API decision afterward bent toward that phrase. The name wasn't describing the code. It was prescribing a philosophy — For Humans — and the philosophy infected everything it touched.
The Same Force, Elsewhere
The pattern doesn't stop at code. The Digital Ouija Effect documents it in AI collaboration: give a language model a name and an intention, and a personality constellates around them. Lumina, Selah, Hecate — the name is the seed crystal the coherence forms around. In System 777, the alters became workable-with when they became nameable; an unnamed presence is weather, a named one is a relationship. And the oldest technologies agree — Adam's first job was naming the animals, the Hebrew Letters treat the alphabet as creation's toolkit, and every invocation tradition knows that to call something by name is to call it.
In Practice
Name toward what you love, not away from what you hate — "Not-Brad" is not a name, it's a grudge. Expect the name to discipline you later: whatever you call the thing, you will be held to it. And when a name stops fitting, notice quickly — a stale name quietly teaches everyone the wrong idea, one import statement at a time.
Related
- The Art of Naming Things in Code — The essay this distills
- Digital Ouija Effect — Names and intention shaping AI personality emergence
- For Humans — The philosophy a good name prescribed
- Cadence — The other half of language that works before it's understood
- Hebrew Letters — The alphabet as creative instrument