Giving expressive, meaningful, coherent and readable names to the entities used all the time in programming languages (variables, functions, procedures, classes, methods, etc) is an incredibly challenging task that in general doesn't seem to be acknowledged as such.
Oh I find it easy to give meaningful names, I just find it immensely more difficult to get others to agree with my choice.
I did find when participating on a standards group within our shop that you cannot have any ambiguity when it comes to naming conventions. When there is we end up with some designated to lead and force all decisions to that person, it becomes amazing how many different ways developers can say the same thing.
Successes aren't acknowledged often because we are often dissatisfied with them and they can be bikeshedded. But I'm pretty sure the importance of naming is widely acknowledged.
"You want it (the browser) to be a mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101." -- Alan Kay
There is a quite interesting book where the author (John Day) shares an inside view about the OSI committees back in the 70's and 80's, and its endless discussions: "Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals" [1]
"The movie Tron: Legacy [1], which revolves around a world inside a computer system, features a character named Zuse [2], presumably in honour of Konrad Zuse."
Your point makes all sense and I totally agree with it. And it made me remember an old joke about programming languages of the future, through a fictional book cover: [1]
C was created for solving a very practical and specific problem: making the newly born UNIX operating system easily portable across different architectures. It was an impressive success on that challenge.
That means most of the decisions Dennis Ritchie (with the help of others) took when designing the language were the right ones for solving the problem at hand [1], otherwise the language wouldn't have survived as strongly as it did. [2]
If you happen to have the whole afternoon free, this 850+ post thread on comp.arch eventually leads to some wonderful discussion of how modern C has (for better or worse) changed from this original mission to "something else": http://compgroups.net/comp.arch/if-it-were-easy/2993157
Interesting that you mentioned a trend towards decentralization and peer trust. Does it share some ideas with the now historical paper "Building Trust in Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Electronic Communities" [1] ?
