[sugar] On the Naming of Sugar

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 12:08 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
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> I think Sugar has a naming problem.  There are a lot of different digital
> objects being produced by this project, and referring to all of them as
> Sugar is becoming increasingly confusing.  For example, the discussion
> about "Sugar on Windows" has been all but incomprehensible, because each
> author means something entirely different by the term "Sugar".  Similarly,
> the recent proposals for "inclusion in Sugar" are extremely confusing,
> since these components will not be required to run Sugar.
>
> To resolve this, I am going to attempt to list a number of important,
> distinct digital objects that this work has produced. I will also
> introduce cutesy codenames.  I hope that the Sugar developers will adopt a
> clear set of distinct names, and I do not care if they choose these names
> or other names.
>
> * Sweet (the taste of sugar)
> * Glucose (the fundamental, simple sugar used by all life forms)
> * Fructose (the main sugar in fruit, which is how we're supposed
> to get our sugar.)
> * Sucrose ("table sugar", the kind you buy in the store.  It
> consists of glucose and fructose, combined.)
> * Ribose (the sugar used by all lifeforms to control their
> hardware, in the form of RNA.  It's important, but not sweet.)
> * A starch (starch is composed of multiple sugars bonded together.)
> Description: We often distribute complete disk images for Sugar, ready to
> boot.  These images are composed of multiple elements of the above stack.
> ~ For example, the current Joyride images are composed of Ribose (the
> non-graphical work) and Glucose (the shell) but not Fructose (the activity
> package).

It took me several minutes to get my mind all the way around your
analogy and be able to remember all the bits without looking. So we
would have some more explaining to do. But I like it. I can probably
find pictures of all of these molecules, and if not, we can generate
them in any of several Free Software packages.

> Each image series should be named separately, to minimize
> confusion.  For cutesy codenames, we could have a development build
> ("glycogen", a starch used to produce Glucose) and a stable build
> ("cellulose", an extremely stable starch).
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay