The title and graphic suggest an article about the most delicious treat known to humans, and the post is about software. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
To be fair, this is a mistake that started with the Google paper, and everyone else just copies the mistake.
The paper calls them Macaroons as a play on (browser) Cookies with layers (of caveats) - so clearly they meant macarons as well, since a macaroon doesn't have layers. Or at least, that's always been my interpretation of the name. It's possible it was just an arbitrary play on hMAC cookies and not the layers?
I had that thought, although according to another comment the definitions have crossover. Probably because people so frequently confuse the two, but here we are.
Yeah I clicked here thinking this would be an interesting story about why macarons are so popular these days or something. When I saw a code block I closed immediately. I'm a programmer but I don't care about every random, poorly-named library or framework that exists.
To be fair, it's not a library or framework, it's a format for certain types of security tokens. They're kind of like fancier cookies, hence the name "macaroon". Not so poorly-named, in my opinion (to the extent that "cookies" was ever a sensible name). Just the right level of whimsy while still calling back to what they are.
This is an obscure form of nominative determinism. Biscuits tend to be named after French leadership (eg Bourbon, Napoleon, etc), thus obviously someone whose name is nearly a biscuit should become leader of France.
(There are also Garibaldi biscuits, which would at first seem to dilute the theory... but he was born in France!)
It is an oddly specific choice to use the word macaroon for this, given the widespread confusion over macaron vs. macaroon and how many other unambiguous variants of "cookie" are available for naming a piece of software that is a newer fancier cookie. I do not accept Wikipedia's milquetoast concession to call a macaron a "French macaroon".
Was it intentionally named as an allusion to this confusion? Software is full of hand-wringing over naming and the importance of naming. Is it supposed to be a kind of cookie that is often mistaken for a different cookie?
Or is this just another referer, a mistake that has been accepted as canon. Referer has the benefit of not being a real word at all though, so is less confusing.
As far as I remember (maybe Arnar or Úlfar or another of the authors would have a different memory, though) we just wanted a “cool cookie” name. We knew about the -oon/-on distinction and liked the sound of -oon.
I view it as a mild plus that the confusion around the name has educated so many about confectionery taxonomies.
OK, spurred by your comment I consulted my large Larousse dictionary and found these two: maçon (builder) and mâcon (a wine). I challenge others to find others in the ‘mc[r]*n’ form.
