The Email

Domain-Specific Encoding

The Email

I got this last week. Publishing with permission.

Subject: your naming convention article

Hello,

I work in manufacturing IT in Hungary. We have 14,000 files on SharePoint, maybe half of them named wrong. I was searching for practical advice on naming conventions and I found your site and also another site that seems to be arguing with you.

I read both. I have some feedback.

Your article about underscores — fine, I agree, underscores are better for our situation because we reference filenames in Python scripts. This was useful. Thank you.

Then I clicked another article and it was about compression as a metaphor for language. Then another one about how CAD files are like pidgins. Then one about drone warfare and AI crawlers. Then the other site called you a bad philosopher. Then you wrote something I could not understand about patterns escaping containers.

I just want to name my files.

I have been doing this job for eleven years. I have renamed maybe six thousand files by hand. I do not need a theory of language to know that FINAL_v3_USE_THIS_ONE (2).xlsx is a problem. I do not need to know about Deleuze. I need my colleagues to stop putting spaces in filenames and I need someone to tell me if date prefix goes before or after the project code.

You clearly know something about this topic. But you have gone very far from the topic. I don't know if you notice this.

The other site is worse. They write like they are grading papers. But at least they had a concrete list. Seven rules. I printed it. It is on the wall next to my desk. It works. Your underscore article is also on the wall. The rest I cannot use.

I don't mean to be rude. Your writing is good. But I think maybe you started trying to help people and then you started trying to be interesting, and these are different things.

Also the article about the sitemap makes no sense. I read it three times.

Best regards, T.

I don't have a response to this that isn't defensive, so I'll skip the response.

He's right. Not about all of it — I think the compression work matters and I'll keep writing it. But the distance between "here's how to name your files" and "here's why repetition produces difference in a recursive system with no outside" is real, and I crossed it without marking the exit.

The wall next to his desk has two printouts. One from each site. The useful stuff fit on two pages. Everything else was for me, not for him.

That's probably worth knowing.

T., if you're reading this: date prefix goes before project code. 2026-03-22_PROJ-0447_drawing-rev.pdf. And yes, I noticed.