> It's called branding and because's limited words that naturally have meaning - and the best words are likely to be coopted for projects in similar fields
"best" based on what criteria? Searchability is certainly a factor, no? Branding is pretty useless if people can't find your product.
> then it's not difficult for people to search "lumen elixir". Likewise if the site you're on is contextual to Elixir then just searching "lumen" will find the result you're looking for.
Right... until someone else creates another Elixir project called Lumen.
I think at some point you have to agree that naming collisions are a problem. The question isn't whether naming collisions are a problem, it's how far we want to subdivide fields before we consider collision to be a problem.
I'd argue that you're drastically underestimating this effect: having to type "Elixir" is definitely going to prevent some people from finding this project. For example, if I'm working with Elixir, and I need to do some frontend work, and someone on the internet suggests Lumen: I'll search "lumen", find the PHP framework, and probably guess that the person on the internet didn't really understand what I was trying to do, which is not an unreasonable guess given the widely-varying quality of answers from randos on the internet. Sure, I could search "lumen elixir", but how would I know to do that if I didn't already know what it was?
Contrast this with other ways of measuring the value of a name. Lumen is a word related to BEAM? Why is that important? Sounds cool? Again, why is that important? Pronounceable/memorable? Okay, but actually there are thousands of words that are unused, that are both those things.
You can't trot out "it's called branding" as if that proves any of these things are important: highly successful brands like "Prozac" or "Kleenex" or "Clorox" show that even being a real word isn't important.
Nope, I'm not accusing you of saying that isn't a problem. I'm merely demonstrating that a problem starts at some number of keywords. I understand that your argument is that the problem starts at two keywords (in this case) not one. Correct?
Would you care to respond to why you think users will know to type "exixir" when they search for "lumen", or why you think that "lumen" is a good marketing term? All you've done is misuderstood one small part of what I said: you haven't actually responded to the other 3/4 of what I said.
Why is "Apple" a good brand name? A brand is what you make of it.
It makes no sense for users to hear about "Elixir Lumen" from outside the Elixir crowd - so if they search for "lumen" and don't see the result, if they're paying attention and have minimal competency using search engines, then they'd type in "lumen elixir" to find correct result.
"best" based on what criteria? Searchability is certainly a factor, no? Branding is pretty useless if people can't find your product.
> then it's not difficult for people to search "lumen elixir". Likewise if the site you're on is contextual to Elixir then just searching "lumen" will find the result you're looking for.
Right... until someone else creates another Elixir project called Lumen.
I think at some point you have to agree that naming collisions are a problem. The question isn't whether naming collisions are a problem, it's how far we want to subdivide fields before we consider collision to be a problem.
I'd argue that you're drastically underestimating this effect: having to type "Elixir" is definitely going to prevent some people from finding this project. For example, if I'm working with Elixir, and I need to do some frontend work, and someone on the internet suggests Lumen: I'll search "lumen", find the PHP framework, and probably guess that the person on the internet didn't really understand what I was trying to do, which is not an unreasonable guess given the widely-varying quality of answers from randos on the internet. Sure, I could search "lumen elixir", but how would I know to do that if I didn't already know what it was?
Contrast this with other ways of measuring the value of a name. Lumen is a word related to BEAM? Why is that important? Sounds cool? Again, why is that important? Pronounceable/memorable? Okay, but actually there are thousands of words that are unused, that are both those things.
You can't trot out "it's called branding" as if that proves any of these things are important: highly successful brands like "Prozac" or "Kleenex" or "Clorox" show that even being a real word isn't important.