Will Daly, at Dev Nonsense, on the Apple sample project SillyBalls:

In case you never had the pleasure of running this program, allow me to describe the experience. A window appears, titled “Bob Land.” Then, a ball, randomly colored and labeled “Bob,” is drawn. And another, and another, filling the window with chaotic abandon.

Bob Johnson, the author of the original SillyBalls, left Apple in 2001, the year I joined.

The sequel to SillyBalls, Son of Silly Balls, is one of the earliest sample projects I recall reviewing (the ReadMe and related metadata, not the code!).

That we know SillyBalls was written by Johnson (and who updated it over time) is a clear indication the project was created before Steve Jobs returned to Apple. One of his early commandments after his return was that the names of engineers would be scrubbed from public content; partly to dissuade employee poaching, but also to instill a sense of “One Apple”—the idea that the collective “we” created products at Apple, not the individual. By the time I joined DTS in 2001, this mindset was firmly ingrained, especially in Developer Relations, and no names (or even initials) would ever again appear in sample projects.

(Sometimes, though you can still see hints of the author shine through. In Son of Silly Balls, the use of “localisation” and “Share and Enjoy” points clearly to my illustrious erstwhile DTS colleague, Quinn.)

Amusingly, Son of Silly Balls isn’t the only familial connection to earlier sample projects. There’s also Son of Grab, Son of MungGrab and Bride of Mung.

Do these names make any sense out of context? Nope. Several years later, this realization would lead to a correction of sorts, resulting in verbosely descriptive sample project names. For example PhotoToss: CSS Transforms, Transitions, and Web Fonts and, more recently, Sharing texture data between the Model I/O framework and the vImage library.

In service of improved clarity, we lost a bit of whimsy.

(Via my friend and former colleague Tyler Stone.)