So I'm wondering about the origin of "ActiveRecord" and "ActionPack" and
the like in Rails.
I've always thought that perhaps DHH found himself in a suit one day
(maybe he had to attend a friend's wedding or something), and as long as
he had the suit on, decided to lapse into a one of the barely lucid
frenzies that Marketing people are prone to when naming something.
Then today I was reading about Flex on Rails, and find that Flex is
based on something called "ActiveScript".
This has me wondering, is there some well-spring of this "Active"
nonsense somewhere in the annals of development that I happened to have
missed? Maybe it came from Java land or something (I was lost in C and
C++ land during the entire decade of the 90's, so I totally missed all
that Java stuff).
So, help me out. Why all this "Active" stuff in the naming of present
day development environments?
On Dec 31, 10:50 pm, Jeff Pritchard <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net>
OK, from what I see in the replies so far, it would seem that
ActiveRecord owes its name to the design pattern of the same name, so
perhaps it was not DHH who found himself in a suit one day.
Did most of the other many uses of the root word "action" in naming
things in development environments arise from a contagion of this one
pattern name?
This only seems odd to me based on my belief that most engineers would
have named "ActionController" simply "Controller" or "ControllerBase".
Perhaps during the twenty plus years I've been an Engineer the
self-imposed class structure separating Engineers and "Marketing people"
has narrowed. Seems to me that "marketing guy-ish" naming of things has
made its way much deeper into the strata of development than it once
did. Maybe this is a side effect of the increasing number of
"Startups", with Coders running their own small companies and wearing
many hats.
Not even vaguely important. Just an idle curiosity that traipsed across
my consciousness. Thanks for indulging me.
I remember noticing this, and I remember reading somewhere (on the
Internet, so it must be true) that it's something of a coincidence.
ActiveRecord, as others have said, is based on the ActiveRecord pattern.
ActionPack (which I suspect, with no evidence, may have been originally
just one thing and then later split into ActionController and ActionView)
is, well, a pack of routines that deal with actions (as in MVC controller
actions).
Ditto ActionWebService. And I imagine, at that point, you just start
naming everything with A.
We do go through fun naming trends, memes and snowclones in programming.
There was a while at AOL where everything was this-man and that-man (short
for manager); naturally this ended up at RAINMAN. Microsoft, as someone
else pointed out, went both ActiveCrazy and X-Crazy for a while with
ActiveX. Apple had MacEverything. UNIX has all sorts of memes and
snowclones: recursive acronyms, animals, etc.
When I was fighting spam, we already had SpamJammer, and needed a server to
cancel the accounts of spammers; SpamHammer was a natural. Then we needed
something to deal with large floods, so of course that beget SpamDammer.
Then I started working on a DSL (though I'd never heard the term)
specifically for the postmaster group. Naturally, it had to be called
SpamGrammar.
