A name generator makes the cattle herdable. Humans may remember zombie-wombat-kitten but not 3991. You might not ever interact with the machine directly but if you are hunting down an issue from log files it reduces cognitive load.
The important thing is cognitive load is the key thing, as is the possibility of confusion. Zombie-Wombat-Kitten is going to get shortened to ZWK, and hopefully there's no Zombie-Wombat-Keeper (or Zebra-Wagon-Kelp or Zombie-Wombat-Cat for those that just remember zombie-something-small-furry-animal). There's also little/no semantic meaning from that name. api-box-3-991 lets you know what type it is, and the relative vintage, so at a glance, it's not a version 2 box (which would be named api-box-2-991), and it's fairly late in the series, #991 vs #100.
Personally I like the second since we're having cattle not pets, but it's your fleet and this is rather bike-shed-y. :)
fragmede|4 years ago
Personally I like the second since we're having cattle not pets, but it's your fleet and this is rather bike-shed-y. :)