Sam here (Penrose maintainer and one of the authors of this announcement post), AMA :)

> AMA

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

cstrahan

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