Ha, yes! And a couple thousand years later we still haven't learned to fix our identifiers!

Now I am also thinking maybe the Jewish tradition of never naming a child after a still-living relative is not superstitious, but out of a reasonable abhorance of namespace collisions.

Oh, I hadn't thought of that. Interesting idea. (I understand that this is specifically an Ashkenazi tradition, by the way. I'm told that S'fardim name people after living relatives. Now I wonder if they were more prone to descriptive nicknames.)