Monday, February 26, 2007

"I work for Question Mark"

Would you park your fortunes with a company named QuestionMark? Is Comma too pedestrian a name for a software company? Is Hy-phen too generic for a recruitment solutions company? I think so. These are names with no personality. No point in appropriating them. Of the three, I think at least QuestionMark has a logic for their choice.

Out of curiousity, I typed colon.com to see what pops up. As expected, I discovered a digestive health site. Semicolon however, did not throw up a portal on colon surgery. During this odyssey to spot punctuated companies, I discovered one trend. Punctuation marks are a huge hit with software companies. There's even a software development site called OpenParenthesis!

6 comments:

Guy Sie said...

Not too surprising, actually. As a coder you're constantly looking at endless lines of code, amongst a lot of the characters will be... punctualization.

anantha said...

That explains it, I guess. Good point.

Subramaniam Avinash said...

I guess it all started with slashdot. What acolyte says is reflected in the 'news for nerds. stuff that matters site'.

anantha said...

yeah, slashdot might have just started the trend. there's a slashsupport in india.

Anonymous said...

Hello Anantha - Open Parenthesis is actually my blog.

It's meant to bring together two key concepts that have dominated my professional career - writing and coding:

1. Parentheses in writing are often used to insert explanatory text not directly related to the main point (see the wikipedia entry). (I did a PhD in literature & culture, and spent years teaching in a university English enviroment).

2. Parentheses in software development are used for a variety of reasons in different languages, but often they're used to pass parameters to functions (or ti indicate the parameters a function receives). (I've spent the last decade working in software development, specifically on the web).

The site's called "Open Parenthesis" (the singular of parentheses) because the idea is that the conversation is open ended.

It starts an explanatory insertion (like this one), but it can't yet be closed.

It resembles a function taking parameters, but we can't yet close the parentheses because we don't know yet what the possibilities are.

Finally, there's also the notion of "Open" because I'm focused on open source software, as well as open-ness and transparency of conversation in general.

Maybe I need to put this in a blog post on my own blog instead of a comment . . .

Thanks for the link -

John

anantha said...

nice to hear your take, john. i admit, i might have made a mistake by labeling your blog as a software development site. sorry for the goof. will drop into your blog at leisure.