As a mathematician. I cannot get over the fact that a tool called Penrose that makes (according to its documentation) diagrams, does not, in fact, make Penrose diagrams [0]. Nor even Penrose-Carter diagrams [1]
The output looks lovely, and I would like to use this for my math notes, but I cannot bear to accept such a disturbing name.
Question: Why did you chose this confusing name? Could you justify it in the introduction of the documentation? [2]
Would love to hear what diagrams you'd like to make in your notes!
> Why did you chose this confusing name?
The main idea of the project is to generate diagrams from mathematical notations. So we want a name that people can associate with both "notations" and "diagrams." In addition to this, some of us also liked the fact that the name can be broken down into "pen" + "rose" :D.
We're really open to suggestions on names if a new name can help us spread the words on our core idea and the tool. "Escher" was one of the early candidates, too. Let us know!
> Could you justify it in the introduction of the documentation?
Great suggestion! Will do.
> As a mathematician. I cannot get over the fact that a tool called Penrose that makes (according to its documentation) diagrams, does not, in fact, make Penrose diagrams [0]. Nor even Penrose-Carter diagrams [1]
We never got around to make some Penrose diagrams in Penrose, but Penrose is an extensible platform! If you make a lot of them and want to make them in Penrose, join the discord (https://discord.com/invite/a7VXJU4dfR) to chat with us. I'd love to have some Penrose diagrams in our gallery too ;).
FWIW as a non-mathematician: when I hear “Penrose” I think “Penrose Diagram”. The name association would benefit me as a sort of mnemonic: if I saw a binary called penrose on my system, I would guess it has something to do with diagrams (not necessarily Penrose diagrams). Similarly, if I forgot the name of this tool, it would be easy to recall, as there aren’t too many “____ diagram” word pairs floating around in my brain. I give libraries and executables pithy names along the same lines, where one word that isn’t already in use (“Penrose”) strongly associates with another more general word (“diagram”) in my memory.
Look at the VHS tool for example — it doesn’t have anything to do with physical VHS tapes, but it does record a scripted shell invocation as a GIF for embedding in docs and demos and such. Super easy name to remember. See https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs
As a mathematician. I cannot get over the fact that a tool called Penrose that makes (according to its documentation) diagrams, does not, in fact, make Penrose diagrams [0]. Nor even Penrose-Carter diagrams [1]
The output looks lovely, and I would like to use this for my math notes, but I cannot bear to accept such a disturbing name.
Question: Why did you chose this confusing name? Could you justify it in the introduction of the documentation? [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagramme_de_Penrose-Carter
[2] https://penrose.cs.cmu.edu/docs/ref