On Wed, 10 Feb 2021 at 03:10, Jeff Garland
<jeff_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Well, let’s see about that. I’ve been quietly reading this chain because my first reaction to the name of this collection was basically ‘wut’ (it wasn’t that nice actually, but keeping it PG). The house and room analogy is a stretch for me. Houses and rooms build up to neighborhoods — houses and neighborhoods aren’t very dynamic — this collection is built for change. And then there’s the whole ‘history of colonization’ meta topic wrt the name.

Well, old houses are demolished, new ones are built. I fail to see how
houses and neighborhoods aren't dynamic.

> So let’s do some other analysis. If we put ‘colony’ into google, we’re not going to find plf::colony at all — in fact we’re not going to find any results related to computer science in any way. Put in ‘colony computing’ or ‘colony data structure' — interestingly, and I think unfortunately for this name, ‘ant colony optimization’ comes up (new to me today). This data structure is unrelated to these optimization algorithms — since they are graph traversal algorithms. My conclusion is that the name is completely novel, possibly misleading, and not obvious to the target audience (computer scientists).

When I google for "colony c++", plf::colony is the first hit. What do
you mean by suggesting that the target audience
here is computer scientists? I have a very different target audience
for colony - programmers. When toying
with the idea of changing the name, we need to consider whether the
suggested alternative name is as
good as colony is after being given the room/house explanation, not
before that explanation is given, as far
as I care.