It seems to be in the nature of programmers in general, and open source programmers in particular, to want to reinvent the wheel. So if you are looking to find a video conversion program on Sourceforge, you have 190 to choose from. This penchant among programmers is deep-rooted; the phrase "Yet Another" prefixed to a program's name long ago became a way of acknowledging that whatever you were doing, many others had already done it before. There's YABB, "Yet Another Bulletin Board," and YASSP, "Yet Another Solaris Security Package," and Yet Another Bittorrent Client, and on and on.
When two Stanford grad students started upa new venture in 1994, the name was a smart-alecky acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".
Yahoo!
- Excerpt from Dreaming in code : two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software by
Scott Rosenberg
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