Idiomatic qualifier used in the name of programs
A naming convention as a form of computer humour[1] especially among playful programmers, yet another is often abbreviated ya, Ya, or YA in the prefix of an acronym or backronym.
This humorous prefix is an idiomatic qualifier in the name of a computer program, organization, or event for the intention of elevating love and interest for something that seems confessedly unoriginal or unnecessarily repeated.[2] This is a programmer practical joke which is an allusion to the culture of programmer esteem for perfection as seen by software programming principles such as "Keep It Simple Stupid" (KISS) and "Don't Repeat Yourself" (DRY).
Stephen C. Johnson is credited with establishing the naming convention in the late 1970s when he named his compiler-compiler yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler), since he felt there were already numerous compiler-compilers in circulation at the time.
Outside of computing, the YA construct has appeared in astronomy, where YAMOO means Yet Another Map of Orion.[3]
- Yabasic – Yet Another BASIC
- Yaboot – Yet another boot loader
- Yacc – Yet another compiler-compiler
- Yacas – Yet another computer algebra system
- YACP – Yet Another Chat Protocol
- YaDICs – Yet another Digital Image Correlation Software
- YADIFA – Yet Another DNS Implementation For All
- YAFFS – Yet Another Flash File System
- YAGO – Yet Another Great Ontology
- Yahoo! – Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (backronym)[4][5]
- Yakuake – Yet Another Kuake
- YAM – Yet Another Mailer, an email client
- YAML – Yet Another Markup Language. Later redefined to YAML Ain't Markup Language, making it a recursive acronym
- Yandex – Yet another indexer,[6] a web search engine and index
- YA-NewsWatcher – a Usenet client for classic Mac OS
- YANG – Yet Another Next Generation
- YAP – Yet Another Previewer, document previewer
- YAP – Yet Another Prolog, an implementation of the Prolog programming language
- YAPC – Yet Another Perl Conference
- YARN – Yet Another Resource Negotiator
- YARV – Yet Another Ruby VM
- YASARA – Yet Another Scientific Artificial Reality Application, a molecular modeling program
- Yasca – Yet another source code analyzer
- YAS – Yet Another Society, a non-profit organization organizing YAPCs[7]
- YASS – Yet Another Similarity Searcher, a pairwise nucleotide sequence alignment tool with dotplot
- YaST – Yet another Setup Tool, an operating system installation and configuration wizard for SUSE Linux distributions
- Y.A.S.U. – Yet Another SecuROM Utility
- Yate – Yet Another Telephony Engine, VoIP software
- YAWC – Yet Another Wersion of Citadel
- YAWL – Yet Another Workflow Language, a business process modeling language for diagramming workflow patterns
- Yaws – Yet another web server
