No offense, but a paint store isn't a very good comparison, because they have 100s of "named" colors, and you can get 1000s of mixes that then have their own names, when it comes to computer science we use RGB, we can't crack open a can of green and mix it with egg shells white, we use HEX or DEC values to mix red green and blue. And HEX is hardly cryptic, first two digits are red, middle two digits are green, and last two digits are blue. A program/API should always support HEX, and it's good practice to also support DEC values and named colors.