[Cryptography-dev] What's in a name?

[Donald Stufft]

On May 12, 2014, at 5:02 PM, David Reid <dreid at dreid.org> wrote:

> So… while I think the name cryptography itself is very confusing… no one has ever suggested a better name.  At least cryptography has the advantage that it is a word that someone is likely to type into a browser or other search box when looking for things related to cryptography.  Often they will even type it after a python.
> 
> I don't think we should be concerned that Zooko finds it confusing.  Calling it wobblynonce doesn't help make it discoverable to people who just think they want to AES or RSA a thing.
> 
> If we're going to change the name I'd like to have a good reason, something we can point to and say, these are some objective criteria for a name that is friendly to new users and here is a name that qualifies.  Maybe such a thing doesn't exist though.

I think a good reason is that every time cryptography is brought up it sounds like “Who's on First?” where first you have to go through this protocol of well which cryptography do you mean. Yes we’ll lose some google juice from it but I think the benefit of removing the confusion of what the hell “cryptography” means is well worth it.

I don’t think the name actually matters that much for discoverability. If it did then Django, Twisted, six, fabric, paramiko, Werkzeug, etc would never be found.

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Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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