"Yet another", often abbreviated ya, Ya, or YA in the prefix of an acronym or backronym, is a humorous prefix and idiomatic qualifier used in the name of a computer program, organization, or event with the intent of elevating love and interest for something that seems confessedly unoriginal or unnecessarily repeated.[1] It is a naming convention as a form of computer humour,[2] especially among playful programmers. This is a programmer practical joke which is an allusion to the culture of programmer esteem for perfection as seen by software programming principles such as "Keep It Simple Stupid" (KISS) and "Don't Repeat Yourself" (DRY).
Stephen C. Johnson is credited with establishing the naming convention in the late 1970s when he named his compiler-compiler yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler), since he felt there were already numerous compiler-compilers in circulation at the time.
Outside of computing, the YA construct has appeared in astronomy, where YAMOO means Yet Another Map of Orion.[3]
Examples
edit- Yabasic – Yet Another BASIC
- Yaboot – Yet another boot loader
- Yacc – Yet another compiler-compiler
- Yacas – Yet another computer algebra system
- YACP – Yet Another Chat Protocol
- YaDICs – Yet another Digital Image Correlation Software
- YADIFA – Yet Another DNS Implementation For All
- YAFFS – Yet Another Flash File System
- YAGO – Yet Another Great Ontology
- Yahoo! – Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (backronym)[4][5]
- Yakuake – Yet Another Kuake
- YAM – Yet Another Mailer, an email client
- YAML – Yet Another Markup Language. Later redefined to YAML Ain't Markup Language, making it a recursive acronym
- Yandex – Yet another indexer,[6] a web search engine and index
- YA-NewsWatcher – a Usenet client for classic Mac OS
- YANG – Yet Another Next Generation
- YAP – Yet Another Previewer, document previewer
- YAP – Yet Another Prolog, an implementation of the Prolog programming language
- YAPC – Yet Another Perl Conference
- YARN – Yet Another Resource Negotiator
- YARV – Yet Another Ruby VM
- YASARA – Yet Another Scientific Artificial Reality Application, a molecular modeling program
- Yasca – Yet another source code analyzer
- YAS – Yet Another Society (The Perl and Raku Foundation), a non-profit organization organizing YAPCs[7]
- YASS – Yet Another Similarity Searcher, a pairwise nucleotide sequence alignment tool with dotplot
- YaST – Yet another Setup Tool, an operating system installation and configuration wizard for SUSE Linux distributions
- Y.A.S.U. – Yet Another SecuROM Utility
- Yate – Yet Another Telephony Engine, VoIP software
- YAWC – Yet Another Wersion of Citadel
- YAWL – Yet Another Workflow Language, a business process modeling language for diagramming workflow patterns
- Yaws – Yet another web server
See also
edit- Another (disambiguation)
- All pages with titles beginning with Yet Another or Yet another
- Reinventing the wheel
References
edit- ^ Eric S. Raymond, ed. (29 Dec 2003). "Yet Another". The on-line hacker Jargon File. 4.4.7. Retrieved 20 January 2020.
- ^ "hacker humor". www.catb.org. Retrieved 2023-11-23.
- ^ O’Callaghan, Jonathan (2 October 2023). "The Orion Nebula Is Full of Impossible Enigmas That Come in Pairs". New York Times. Retrieved 8 October 2023.
- ^ "Yahoo! - Company History". Yahoo! Inc. Archived from the original on 1999-10-13.
The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle' but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
- ^ Paul Gil (2 July 2019). "What Does "Yahoo" Stand For?". Lifewire. Dotdash. Retrieved 20 January 2020.
Yahoo stands for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.'
- ^ "What does "Yandex" mean?". History of Yandex. Yandex. Retrieved 26 Dec 2016.
- ^ "Yet Another Society on WikiWikiWeb". Retrieved 5 Jan 2018.
