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How Programming Languages Got Their Names

kylehigginson.medium.com

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Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names

#41

Post by tmtvl »

p4bl0 wrote: post #9

This 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…

Scheme: Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele were working on a followup to Conniver, which they called Schemer, but but the machine they were working with only allowed 6-character names.

Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names

#45

Post by tmtvl »

miggol wrote: post #33

For those of us who like the braces: Lisp comes from List Processor. Scheme was first called Schemer, which itself evolved out of the Planner language developed by Carl Hewitt at MIT. Schemer was shortened to Scheme to fit the ITS filesystem's six character filename limit (!) on the PDP-10. Racket is a kind of Scheme. (I like this one) Guile comes from Guy L. Steele, one of the initial Scheme developers. The other be…

Kawa Scheme: From the Polish word for coffee.

Gambit: Another kind of Scheme.

SBCL: Steel Bank Common Lisp, forked from CMU Common Lisp, CMU being the university named after the founder of a steel factory and a pair of bankers.

Maclisp: Created for MIT's project MAC (the Project on Mathematics and Computation).

Franz Lisp: A pun on the composer Franz Liszt.

Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names

#46

Post by refset »

p4bl0 wrote: post #9

This 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…

According to Wikipedia:

> The original name SEQUEL, which is widely regarded as a pun on QUEL, the query language of Ingres, was later changed to SQL (dropping the vowels) because "SEQUEL" was a trademark of the UK-based Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Engineering Limited company. The label SQL later became the acronym for Structured Query Language.

Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names

#49

Post by madcaptenor »

R: 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/questions/368224/why-is-r-us...

Re: How Programming Languages Got Their Names

#50

Post by madcaptenor »

lawgimenez wrote: post #24
p4bl0 wrote: post #9

This 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…

Swift named after the Swift bird?

no, it's named after Taylor.
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