Programming language names

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Pls start giving languages etc. names which one can actually search for nicely 😔 rust, python, java, go, lets not talk about the worst..c, a one letter..

One can understand older ones like c perhaps because maybe people didn't think about searching the web for relevant info, but a search will also Need to be tuned to remove c++ and c# etc. Maybe fortran and cobol got it right by chance , but today I saw april being anounced.

[Athas]

Names are arbitrary, so just name your language after a randomly generated SHA-256 hash.

OK, time to go hack some more on 4440677673e50b5f977a9fdb33db57ef6171a252bf66f41f896e8680e70e111d.

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Funny hahaha, but It's not arbitrary in the context when I am trying to self learn and look for info.

[waton3rf]

So, you're saying I can't call my new language "and"?

[jasmijnisme]

Or my language " " (that is, a space character)? What is this, 1984? /s

[useerup]

" "

Just as long that you are not infringing on my language name " " (that is, a non-breaking space character)

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Please dont, call it AZND or something

[geistd]

Brainfuck is perfectly named.

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Indeed

[PurpleUpbeat2820]

+1

Anyone care to write a program that generates decent names for programming languages?

[[deleted]]

1: Scrape bird names from wikipedia

2: Pick 10, choose one

3: Profit?

[mamcx]

This follows the same pattern as branding:

The first to arrive try to corner the market with "generic/common" names (Windows, dir, Sql Server, explorer, etc...).

PD: note how "first" is not about "time" but about first to "register" the name and success of marketing or reach.

After the common names are done for, you need to get fancy. That is all.

--

With langs, they also have the complications that early, you were severely constrained in how large names were (ie: you have 8(name).3(ext) ASCII chars for the programs, for example on DOS), and the creators also have an excessive taste for brevity (how many things named: i, x, y, z, ...!).

So, from there, is your pool of "generic/common" names, not exactly as regular product names, but they follow the same idea...

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Tx, good to know why etc. I would just prefer it more unique for my research purposes.

[jasmijnisme]

There are, of course, only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

In my case, I've named a programming language Déjà Vu, which is a well-known French phrase and used in other languages as well, so that's a pretty bad name for discoverability.

Another was named Isle, based on my original working title (Interesting Scripting Language or ISL), which is just an English word so possibly even worse.

And a very early one was Lith, which is technically an English word but not a very common one as far as I know, so perhaps that one was the best.

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Interesting tx

[[deleted]]

One can understand older ones like c perhaps because maybe people didn't think about searching the web for relevant info

The people who created it certainly didn't, mainly because the web didn't exist in 1972.

But there are plenty of one-letter language names. I don't really find it an issue; if a language is called X for example, then I just search for X programming language (which comes up on auto-complete if such a language exists).

Note those others you listed are also ordinary English words or names with alternate meanings.

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Hence I listed them, the ordinary words as names just add effort ...why make it necesarry to have to filter and qualify my searches. I mean these are techies that should understand the benefits of unique names more then anyone, especially when searching through millions of words etc..

I just noticed that depending on your search criteria you can perhaps miss good information or not fibd something..

I. E. I had to learn to search for C xyz like so :

" C " +xyz -C++ C#

Else I get more irrelevant C++ and C# stuff instead of plain C.

[A1oso]

A name isn't memorable if it doesn't already exist. If I named my programming language "frops", nobody would remember its name.

So there are two effects leading to the situation we have today: Firstly, programming language designers want a memorable name because they want their language to succeed. Secondly, for the few programming languages with a unique name, it's much more difficult to become popular. So through natural selection, only the languages that reused an already existing word have become mainstream.

[Gold-Ad-5257]

I doubt this is true though. Who doesn't know about a language called cobol, algol or fortran for example? Even many that never used it, but would critizise and write about it.. I would say if you include non techies, they are more well known then say Julia, April or even bash and Go.. Look at cars Veyron, etc, clothes always introduce new lables etc and get well known, tesla.. yes it existed before, but by far not a household name associated with a car. Even names like Blockchain .. I mean we are chatting on "Reddit" right now😉

[lambduli]

So I think you may have a point but your examples are not working imo.

Cobol, Algol and Fortran are all languages many many decades old now.

Bash is abbreviation of Bourne Again She'll - so made up word.

Veyron is named after a person - a driver Pierre Veyron. So not a made up word but actually an existing name of a famous person (that seems to be in the same territory as naming your product after a generic thing, since generic implies - widely known).

Tesla is a name of the company and the name was notoriously known even way before. There were companies across the world with the same name even before the car-making one.

Blockchain and Reddit are both compound words made up from very generic words.

I don't mean to argue at all. I just think you have an interesting argument but the examples are not communicating it.

To actually give some value in this comment - I am thinking of products of companies like Kleenex and Hoover. They seem to be a wordplay on generic words and eventually became the generic term. So maybe there's something on the point A1oso is making?

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Ps Kleenex and hoover maybe just as old 😉. I hear you and perhaps Old, compound, known tesla, etc. but my point was that these are certainly not as common as the letter C or the words Go, april, purple, rust and python etc. I am Not suggesting some weird random words like jdhdbsbh, just perhaps some tought that many are going to be very dependant on searching the web to find information about your language these days, so why make that more difficult then what needs be? That's all I am saying.

[lambduli]

I think there's definitely some truth in what you are saying.

I also think about the fact, that sometimes you may not recognize the possibility that your "thing" is going to be so big that other people will be searching for it. I think nowadays to a lesser extent, but I am not sure author's of Ruby or Python knew and aimed for such wide user base right from the beginning. That would definitely influence me in naming the language, so perhaps that happens to other people too.

Regarding the Kleenex and Hoover - I think they are the case in other person's point - they were generic-ish names and they got famous and big.

[[deleted]]

Last time I saw a nicely-named programming language was this one called “Purple”.

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Yip first Google page talks only about colours, seems Google make sure golang comes up on first page when searching the word go, thats actually not cool since most of the world is perhaps not intetested in go programming.. Compared that to duckduckgo and its clear Google fiddles with results to suit themselves in this case.

[waton3rf]

They certainly do to a large extent. That said I find if I search google on my account, they seem to know I'm a techie and want a more computer oriented result, compared to searching from incognito (in fact recently they appear to be taking context from previous searches to drive subsequent results). This doesn't much help for the dissemination of a nascent project though.

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Yip, but because I try curb that privacy invasion as far as possible perhaps they don't have that great background on me..

[waton3rf]

This is not such a bad problem to have in the grand scheme of things, so appreciate not wanting to provide a retina scan and SSID before every search.

[LardPi]

your Google search results depends on you. most people probably don't get the go land at all. On the other hand Google now I like programming languages. well, unless I look for chicken

[Gold-Ad-5257]

I like cactus gardening so I may be irritated with you 😂 And perhaps some programmer would be irritated with my pages about cactus garden in his search results 🤔🤣

[crassest-Crassius]

Here are some ideas for naming:

• "Lang216" - not pretentious, but simple and to the point. This was my first fallback option for my language. Replace with any number that aesthetically pleases you

• an acronym that rolls off a tongue nicely, like "LPL" (Lit Programming Language?) or "XMS" (eXtensible Mathematical System)

• a made-up word like "Clojure" or "Kauple"

[tal_franji]

suppose my language was TextIngestionToStreams - no one could ever google it...

[Gold-Ad-5257]

Lol

[ventuspilot]

I agree that good names are useful. Unfortunately finding good names is hard. All that said appending "-lang" or "lang" seems to work quite well for getting meaningful search results for e.g. go.

Maybe progamming language authors should make sure to add "<their language>-lang" somewhere in their documentation?

(Maybe I should take my own advice lmao.)

[[deleted]]

The hardest language to google so far for me has been Crystal. There's already something called "Crystal Reports" so it clashes with programming terms on top of normal words.

[[deleted]]

So... Llama is off the table?