Do we need the big cat names for Mac OS X?

[slothbear]

[ Boston guy here... As I've been reviewing the curriculum, I've come up with some questions. I figure they can't hurt. Feel free to brush 'em off if they've already been covered before. ]

I don't understand why the Macintosh Installfest page goes to the trouble of mapping numeric version (e.g. 10.7) to big cat names (e.g. Lion). This sets up an abstraction (names instead of numbers) that's used only once – and by people that probably don't know the cat names anyway.

The cat names read nicer than numbers, but it seems simpler to just label things with the version number found in "About This Mac".

[tjgrathwell]

You might be right, but I think I have some psychological attachment to the cat names.

The only argument I can offer for keeping them is that certain people (sometimes myself) refer to OS versions more often by the cat name (as in, "you're on Leopard? well, this is going to be challenging") so it's good to have that mapping in peoples' heads.

I was going to make an argument for googlability (like whether rvm osx 10.6 returns better or worse results than rvm snow leopard) but I think the results are similar enough not to matter.

[slothbear]

Ok – I can see the usefulness of mapping the number you see in About This Mac to a cat to use outside of Railsbridge.