Why would Kotlin be named after Kotlin Island? What's the connection?
It’s definitely more interesting to know /who/ named something and /why/, not just /what/ it’s named after.
How Programming Languages Got Their Names
101–110 of 121 posts
Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names
#102This list is disappointingly short. Here's a few more of the top of my head, feel free to expand the list! : C: a successor to B, itself derived from BCPL. C++: increments over C. D: a successor to C. LISP: LISt Processor. FORTRAN: FORmula TRANslator. ALGOL: ALGorithmic Language. Prolog: PROgrammation LOGique (logic programming in French). PHP: initially PHP/FI for "Personal Home Page Form Interpreter", later rebrand…
I suppose it's quite widely known where "JavaScript" comes from, but seeing it next to all the others and how they were named on the list, it seems like the... saddest etymology of them all.
Fitting, in my opinion.
Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names
#103Haskell Curry has the honor of having two programming languages named after him: Haskell and Curry [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry_(programming_language)
It is weird that Haskell (programming language) is named after Curry's first name though. That isn't generally how you name things (other than people). About the only other thing I think of that works that way is America, named after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci. "Vespuccia" would have been a more logical choice.
America was very likely not named after Amerigo Vespucci - as you stated correctly, naming something after someone's first name is unlikely. It seems very plausible that it is named after the Amerrique mountains.
Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linda has a particularly unsavory origin story (hint: It has a connection to Ada): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(coordination_language) That probably wouldn't fly anymore in today's CS research. As for Oberon, the moon may have played a role, but according to stories recently told at Niklaus Wirth's memorial service, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and the mythological character in general https://en.wikipedia.org…
> "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and the mythological character ... may have had more to do with it" Which contradicts with what he wrote in his "Project Oberon" book: " Although the search for an appropriate name for a project is usually a minor problem and often left to chance and whim of the designers, this may be the place to recount how Oberon entered the picture in our case. It happened that around the time of the…
OK, that would be a pretty conclusive evidence that the moon was the primary consideration. However, it's entirely possible that the name, when it was in the news, caught his attention because of the mythological background. Cf "Lilith", the first workstation he built. "Ceres" again both has astronomical and mythological connotations — I'm not sure whether Voyager encountered Ceres, though.
Wirth's love of the theater (and costume parties) was attested to by his family at the memorial service. It was not something that his students knew about him (maybe grad students did).
Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also C#, where # represents a duplication of "++", on top of each other. Technically, the # is not the sign for the musical sharp key (♯), but "C sharp" sounds better than "C hash", "C pound" or "C octothorp". :) Edit: On an unrelated note, TIL that the sign used on telephone keys is also not #, but ⌗ -- a.k.a. the "Viewdata square" [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewdata#Keypad_symbols:_the_s...
And then there's F#, which _does_ play on musical notation. But I suppose F is also for "functional".
The F there is for System-F! According to Don Syme, although I don’t personally know what System-F is. https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/12/f_6_were_making_f/
Don Syme is a pretty cool guy from what I’ve seen online too. He enjoyed supporting and attending Migrateful (UK charity where refugees/asylum seekers teach cooking classes) which I’m appreciative of in particular.
Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names
#106Zig apparently got its name from this: https://gist.github.com/andrewrk/73742bf4b8ed795c85ce Just rolled the dice on 'z' + vowel + consonant + consonant until something good came up.
Is that real? There are plenty of references to Zero Wing on the website for the Zig language.
Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names
#107Smalltalk was named such as Alan Kay (https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/50)
> had mentioned to someone that the "prose" of then current programming languages was lower than a cocktail party conversation, and that great progress would have been made if we could even get to the level of making "smalltalk".
Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names
#108R: pirates Actually, there was an earlier language named S, for "statistics". R was intended as a successor to S - I suppose T would have been the natural name, then, or S++ - but also the inventors had first names starting with R. I've heard people speculate it has something to do with correlation coefficients, which it doesn't, but that r comes from "reversion" or "regression": https://stats.stackexchange.com/quest…
In their paper (1), the authors state that R is to relate to S, but also to, in their words, "part to celebrate our own efforts". (Note their first names!). It's a great paper, by the way.
1. Ihaka, Ross, and Robert Gentleman. “R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics.” Journal of Computational & Graphical Statistics 5, no. 3 (1996): 299–314.
Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names
#109Zig apparently got its name from this: https://gist.github.com/andrewrk/73742bf4b8ed795c85ce Just rolled the dice on 'z' + vowel + consonant + consonant until something good came up.
Is that real? There are plenty of references to Zero Wing on the website for the Zig language.
The gist I linked is shared by Andrew Kelley, creator of the language. My best guess is that he rolled something similar to 'zig' and was reminded of the Zero Wing reference before deciding to take off with Zig (for great justice).
Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then there's F#, which _does_ play on musical notation. But I suppose F is also for "functional".
The F there is for System-F! According to Don Syme, although I don’t personally know what System-F is. https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/12/f_6_were_making_f/ Don Syme is a pretty cool guy from what I’ve seen online too. He enjoyed supporting and attending Migrateful (UK charity where refugees/asylum seekers teach cooking classes) which I’m appreciative of in particular.
System F is a polymorphic lambda calculus, it's more theoretical than practical (typing must be explicit or type inference may be impossible) but a restriction of its typing scheme is one you may have heard of, and the Hindley-Milner type inference algorithm works for it.