“When people mix up entomology and etymology, it bugs me in ways I have no words for.”

I have been using Ansible for a number of years. There are a number of things I could critique, but the biggest one is how slow it is. Running a bunch of ssh commands in a for loop would be far faster. Of course, that’s not as robust or flexible, but it is hard to understand why Ansible is so much slower.

I started joking that the word “ansible” is derived from a Latin word meaning “painfully slow”. Making etymology jokes is a sure sign of a nerd, but even more so is digging into the actual etymology. I first thought that it was related to the word runcible from the Edward Lear poem The Owl and the Pussy Cat. While associating Ansible with nonsense was satisfying, it was not true. It only took one more search to find that the word ansible was invented by Ursula Le Guin as the name of a faster-than-light communications device.

That’s some big-league irony! The slowest software on the planet named for a device that is faster than the laws of physics permit; which is, I guess, a nonsense of its own.

I would like to think that both Lear and Le Guin would be offended by being associated with this software. I know I am.