Uncommons Maths – The Name Game

Posted in Java by Dan on November 26th, 2007

Just to clear up a possible misconception, Uncommons Maths is not intended as a slight against Apache Commons Math (regardless of the incidental mention Commons Math received in my previous rant against Commons Lang). Commons Math provides a lot of functionality that Uncommons Maths does not and probably never will.

The domain name that I use for my software is uncommons.org. The library does maths-type stuff. The name was obvious. Why “Maths” not “Math”? Because that’s what we call it here.

I looked at Commons Maths once and it didn’t meet my requirements (I can’t even remember what they were), which is why I chose not to use it, not because it was defective in any way. The only reason I ever mentioned Commons Math is because it was at that moment, after previous disappointments with some of the Apache Commons libraries, that I exclaimed “We don’t need common software, what we need is uncommon software!”. It was a statement of intent. Hence the domain name.