Why do you think they have no real understanding of what the periodic table does? This is a really silly reaction.
If someone made a map of the US with only cities that have repositories named after them highlighted or some such thing would reasonable geographers think, "this is meaningless! They don't even understand what a map is!" (I hope not).
It's something for fun, and not presenting itself any other way... It's not even "abusing" the period table format for some other data (when I saw the link I thought it might be related to languages used on GitHub), it's literally mirroring the names of the elements that are in the real table but linking to projects with the same name...
Sometimes I just don't get some perspectives on HN--if I were a chemist who also knew that naming things in software is hard, it probably would have made me chuckle not furrow my brow.
If someone made a map of the US with only cities that have repositories named after them highlighted or some such thing would reasonable geographers think, "this is meaningless! They don't even understand what a map is!" (I hope not).
It's something for fun, and not presenting itself any other way... It's not even "abusing" the period table format for some other data (when I saw the link I thought it might be related to languages used on GitHub), it's literally mirroring the names of the elements that are in the real table but linking to projects with the same name...
Sometimes I just don't get some perspectives on HN--if I were a chemist who also knew that naming things in software is hard, it probably would have made me chuckle not furrow my brow.
Edit: missing word