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How programming languages got their names

James.Scott on January 04, 2020

Phil Karlton once said there are only two hard things in computer science: "cache invalidation and naming things" and it's because of the latter th...
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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

My favorite conspiration theory is that the names go and swift were chosen specifically to make it hard to google stuff.

If I invent a programming language, I will call it the.

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FJones

"the programming language" does make for a nice tagline, too.

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Ben Sinclair

The The manage to still be the first hits for "the the".

the The album cover, "Soul Mining"

I remember there was a catalogue company in the UK, I think it was part of Littlewoods, but it was well-established, except... it was called "index". That didn't do too well in the old web search era.

I think what we're really looking for here is some kind of A E S T H E T I C language.

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Aaron Reese

A bit like the document database from intersystems called chache with an accent on the e. Definitely doesn't work when searching for cache database

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Stuart Lindstrom

Drop the “the”. Just ; it’s cleaner.

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zacharylayne

What about just naming it with the EOL character? 4 spaces?

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bento64

pain is more accurate tbh

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Darshak Parikh

I got that reference.

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Lasse

I'll call mine as "why"

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

"Why why?"
nice tagline

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Nijeesh Joshy

someone: What is the best programming language to learn in 2045 ?

google: why?

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mikoloism • Edited

😁
Google : why road map?

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Richard de Wit • Edited

Also the new language V, it was originally named Volt. Why, just why?! The author is even aware it's un-google-able:

Why "V"?

Initially the language had the same name as the product it was created for: Volt. The extension was ".v", I didn't want to mess up git history, so I decided to name it V :)

It's a simple name that reflects the simplicity of the language, and it's easy to pronounce for everyone in the world.

Please note that the name of the language is "V", not "Vlang" or "V-Lang" etc.

The name is not very searchable (like Go), so use #vlang on Twitter, vlang on Google etc.

I mean, come on. Just keep it named Volt and change the extension to .vt or something... It even sounded cooler and think of the logos/artwork possible. Well it's too late now.

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Mark Railton

Possibly changed it as Volt is a templating language used for some PHP frameworks, primarily Phalcon.

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MurrayVarey

Nice! Also pretty hard to alphabetise, given that 'the' tends to be ignored.

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Felippe Regazio • Edited

Would be cool to have a book ~Thesign Patterns~

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marcellothearcane

For ultimate ungoogleability, start the name with a minus symbol

-language

On its own, you get no results, because it's a shortcut for excluding keywords from Google

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James Skinner

Don't forget C, C++, C#, Go and .NET, all of which come close for unsearchability. I'm 99% sure search engines special case a ton of search terms like these - I had to add special cases just implementing a simple search on company names some years back.

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Bob Bass

I use .NET and I've become quite fond of speech to text lately. I am a C# developer. It is a nightmare.

Not to mention that whenever I say C#, it shows up as c sharp.

So yes, I spoke this response but I had to manually input a few key words.

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James Skinner

Annoying! I guess text-to-speech software should also allow you to add special cases so that it knows if you say "see sharp" it should insert "C#" and similarly insert ".NET" for "dot net".

You could always use something like AutoIT and write a task that would monitor keypresses in application text boxes and replace them based on your preferred rules.

autoitscript.com/forum/topic/63979...

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zacharylayne

I program in Hack a lot. Imagine how horrible THAT is too look up.

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Binary Delight

Precisely, you always wonder if C# or .NET will yield all the results so occasionally I try csharp and dotnet in my google searches.

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

I am pretty sure that the Google search guys have been working hard on making requests with "go" or "C#" work

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Darshak Parikh

The name Go is partially rejected by the community in favour of Golang. Same would be the fate of Thelang;

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Piotr Murach

Coming up with names is hard. I struggle greatly naming my open source projects, sometimes for days. It is a real struggle. It makes me feel slightly better knowing 'troubles' language creators went through to name their projects.

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James.Scott

It really is! It was quite fun researching this and finding out that the one of the key reasons that some of the names were chosen (Clojure and Elixir in particular) was simply because the name and its domain were free!

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Piotr Murach

Interesting! This is exactly the path I ended up often going down - the pragmatism of a single word that is still available. This seems like a wider strategy in tech. I listened to a podcast with Patrick Collinson where he said that the way they come up with Stripe as company name was basically searching dictionary and domains for a single word that is still cheap to buy.

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lmuzquiz

Can we change javascript to jediscript?

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Darshak Parikh

Isn't it hard enough to tell people the difference between JavaScript and ECMAScript?

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Abel Braaksma • Edited

Kinda expected a little story on how the languages A, B, C and D are related in a 'give a thing a name when you're out of ideas' way (and how they're not), but seeing these more creative names explained is fun to read, for sure. Thanks for the post :)

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MurrayVarey

Yeah, I wish they'd been more creative. C used to be entirely Google-proof.

Also why did they decide to pick it back up at R?

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James Skinner

C came from B, which came from BCPL, and has been followed by D as well as C++, C# and Objective-C, which is actually searchable lol. It has nothing to do with the ABC language though, which actually inspired Python.

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David Kanekanian

it was named after S

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MurrayVarey

"Holy crap, guys -- we're running out of names!"

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Fred Praca • Edited

The word pearl came via the Old French perle meaning 'a bead' or 'something valuable'

Well this is just French not Old French as we are still using it :)

And the same way, we still use rubis but with an ending S.

Finally, the language you could have talked about is Ada which was named after one of the first programmers in the world, Lady Ada Lovelace.

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James.Scott • Edited

I had to summarise here so I may edit the wording if it's unclear. According to the Oxford English Dictionary "perle" had different meanings over the years in Old/Middle French:

perle pearl (c1140 in Old French; compare also Old French, Middle French perne ), bead (1260 in >Old French), the tincture argent in heraldry (a1458), highly esteemed person (1532), valuable thing >(1546), the teeth (1552), round capsule containing a medicinal substance (1853)

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shadow1349

My favorite has to be JavaScript, originally called lightscript. They changed the name to draft off of the success of Java hence JavaScript haha just straight up plagiarism

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James.Scott

Oh, interesting! Thanks :)

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Johan Dahl

It was called Livescript (read more here en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript under the history section)

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John McCabe • Edited

Sad not to see Ada getting a mention here. Named after Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (often shortened to Ada Lovelace) who is reputedly the world's first computer programmer due to her relationship with Charles Babbage, and also the daughter of Lord Byron, one of England's greatest poets and someone who helped instigate the story of Frankenstein (by Mary Shelley). An additional little nugget of info is that the US DoD diverged from its usual numbering sequence to allow the Ada programming language standard to be designated MIL-STD-1815, the 1815 referring to the year of Ada Lovelace's birth.

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Faris Natour • Edited

Not sure if this comment is in jest, but that's not too far from how Javascript did actually get its name.

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

Correct.
Specifically I was amused that it was called Javasomething because Java was the hot web programming language. That didn't last :D

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#B...

In 1995, Netscape Communications recruited Brendan Eich with the goal of embedding the Scheme programming language into its Netscape Navigator.[18] Before he could get started, Netscape Communications collaborated with Sun Microsystems to include Sun's more static programming language, Java, in Netscape Navigator so as to compete with Microsoft for user adoption of Web technologies and platforms.[19] Netscape Communications then decided that the scripting language they wanted to create would complement Java and should have a similar syntax, which excluded adopting other languages such as Perl, Python, TCL, or Scheme. To defend the idea of JavaScript against competing proposals, the company needed a prototype. Eich wrote one in 10 days, in May 1995.

Although it was developed under the name Mocha, the language was officially called LiveScript when it first shipped in beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995, but it was renamed JavaScript when it was deployed in the Netscape Navigator 2.0 beta 3 in December.[2][20] The final choice of name caused confusion, giving the impression that the language was a spin-off of the Java programming language, and the choice has been characterized[21] as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new Web programming language.

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Darshak Parikh

I wonder what the world would have been like, had they gone with Scheme instead of Java.

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Peter Chynoweth

When I was a Computer Science undergrad in the 1970s I learned B. I had a professor who developed a language similar to B (or BCPL) for use with what were then mini computers. Because he was at a renowned Canadian university (Waterloo) he called the language Eh. I thought that was a lovely and witty name.

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MurrayVarey

I think Rust might be held back by its name. Why name a new language after the crumbly bronze stuff you find on ancient machinery?

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joshparkerj

Cause there's nothing closer to the metal than rust.

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Darshak Parikh

🤯

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Ian Daly

According to Chris Lattner in a blog post Swift was originally called Shiny ✨

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MiAn • Edited

There was already language called SwiftLang, it was owned by Elizabeth Rather's company Forth Inc. as a proprietary means of programming firmware.

Elizabeth is something of a modern Ada Lovelace in that the language was invented by Charles ( Chuck ) Moore, but she was the first programmer since she was co-developer. Something to do with telescopes here, I'm not sure what.

Forth was intended to be named Fourth, meaning it was one generation 'up' from the common 3rd generation view, with Assembly (or Assembler) being the lowest or 1st level. But one could only have 5 letters maximum at the time, so they dropped the 'u'.

The forth community vastly reduced after it was ANSI-fied, with many talented programmers now disillusioned with being constricted. It was said that ".. if you've seen one Forth, you've seen ... one Forth".

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Darshak Parikh

I'm one with the Forth, the Forth is with me.

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Darshak Parikh

Shiny Eevee used Swift. It's super effective.

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Steven Green

Wait? No love for fortran, algol, snobol, cobol, basic, b, c, pascal to name a few.

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James.Scott

Less a lack of love but a more for a lack of time and space 😬

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Steven Green

Get off my lawn!

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Kater Akeren

This is an impressive insight...

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KristijanFištrek

This is interesting, although it seems self-explanatory, it is cool to hear it :D

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Amy

Cool!

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RickBradford

There's only one Eiffel.

But how many languages are there called Easel? There's a CAD/CAM Mac application, and there's a "property-based language" developed at Carnegie Mellon, which may or not be the same as an actor language called Easel which I remember from some time ago.

It's getting almost as hard as naming new cars ....

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Vaibhav Khulbe

Wow! Really interesting. I like these fact-based articles a lot. Thanks for letting us know 😄

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James.Scott

Thanks for reading :)

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Chukycheese🏳️‍🌈

This is really interesting!! I wonder if I can translate into Korean and post it to my github page (chukycheese.github.io), or somewhere you allow me to. Cheers!

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James.Scott

Thanks! Sure, if you want to translate it and share elsewhere that's fine with me :)

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Abdul wakeel

If I invent a programming language then I will build it solid in the first attempt.. No updates no changes until end of the times.

Learn once and live with it forever - till death language.

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James Skinner

Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister ;)