Gem-naming culture

Ruby’s reusable libraries are called gems (they ship through a tool called RubyGems), and naming one is half the fun: the community has a long, delightful habit of choosing puns, jokes, and playful tributes over dry, descriptive names. Two favorites show the range. Nokogiri, the popular HTML and XML parser, is named after the Japanese word nokogiri (鋸), a kind of saw: you have a dense forest of nested tags, so you reach for a saw to cut through it. It was co-created by Aaron Patterson ("tenderlove"), who is known for exactly this sort of wordplay. Sinatra, the minimal web framework, is named after the singer Frank Sinatra, and its own AUTHORS file thanks “Frank Sinatra (chairman of the board) for having so much class he deserves a web-framework named after him”. Once you start noticing the pattern, the whole ecosystem reads a little more like a joke book, and that is very much on purpose.

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