In my company we resorted to name many internal tools and libs after birds.
It becomes a problem though when you want to publish open source tools or libraries. These days it becomes very hard to find a name that isn't already attached to a Github repo. Finding a name that is googlable, unique, somewhat intuitive and descriptive is a problem that does not scale at all.
In WW2, British intelligence analysts inferred that a secret Nazi radar system used only a single beam based on its code name: Wotan (Odin), a god with one eye. For a long time, I have occasionally referenced this example, but today I learned that it was actually sheer luck. The prior radar system that used two beams was also codenamed Wotan.
It becomes a problem though when you want to publish open source tools or libraries. These days it becomes very hard to find a name that isn't already attached to a Github repo. Finding a name that is googlable, unique, somewhat intuitive and descriptive is a problem that does not scale at all.
I'm not surprised the NSA ended up generating names for their tools. At least that's what they seem to do judging by names like Eternal Blue, Double Pulsar, Dander Spritz and the like. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Brokers#Fifth_leak:...)