The origins of the names of 13 programming languages

The origins of the names of 13 programming languages

The origins of the names of 13 programming languages

Programmers may think that it is annoying to name variables when writing code, but they also need to name something else, which is the new programming language. Programming language naming typically has several rules, such as abbreviations based on attributes (such as BASIC,COBOL,TCL and Lisp), based on existing languages (such as c++,c# and Coffeescript), or directly the names of prominent figures in the fields of mathematics and computing (such as Ada, Pascal and Turing). Sometimes the designer's name is more imaginative. Here are 13 meaningful names, and the stories behind them.

Python

Invented in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum, originally intended to kill the boredom of Christmas, first published in 1991, it is an inheritance of the ABC language and a scripting language that is now popular. When named, Guido van Rossum that it should be "short, unique, and a bit of a mystery", a loyal fan of the famous British troupe Monty Python, so it's python.

Java

Born in the early 1990s, Sun's smart home Appliance program was developed, such as Interactive TV. Originally named Oak, but Sun's lawyers found that the name had already been registered. Through a series of meetings, the company chose it from a list containing Silk,dna and Java. It is unclear who was the first to suggest the use of Java, but the general speculation was that it was inspired by the Peet coffee shop, because Sun's engineers liked to drink coffee here.

Forth

In the 1960s, created by Charles Moore. In 1968 Charles Moore worked for a home improvement company called Mohasco, with only a single IBM1130 microcomputer with a maximum of 2250 graphical display points, but it was used to design carpets, but Fortran couldn't meet the requirements, so he invented forth. Originally named fourth, unfortunately, IBM1130 supports up to 5 characters of file name, "U" goes instead of "Forth".

Perl

Known as the "Swiss Army Knife", known for its flexibility and efficiency, it was invented by Larry Wall in the 20 world in the 80 's. Larry Wall's idea is that the name should be short and full of positive meaning. He thought about his wife's name Gloria before Pearl. However, there is already a language called Pearl, so the Pearl "a" is removed. It is worth mentioning that this name has always been lowercase, and the Unix file system is case-sensitive, and when Perl 4 was released in 1991, Larry Wall changed the initial letter to uppercase.

Lua

In 1993, developed by Tecgraf, is a scripting language. The language was developed by Del and Sol, combining the advantages of both, and adding functions such as flow control to their children. In Portuguese, Sol means "the Sun", while Lua means "moon".

Smalltalk

First developed by Xerox PARC in the early the 1970s, it was a member of the object-oriented language, and its shadow was visible in later Java, Python, and Ruby. After optimization, the participant developer Alan Kay said that he should follow the language that the name looks good, such as "Zus" and "Thor" are not long-lived, this law. So, take the "Smalltalk" this flat name.

Logo

In the 1960s, it was a teaching language designed by Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, and also a Lisp dialect, It provides convenience for introducing a lot of program design concepts in the course of teaching, and has profound influence on the later teaching programming language, such as scratch. An important feature of this language is the turtle mapping system. Its name derives from the word "logos", and the Greek language is called "words" or "thoughts" to distinguish it from traditional programming languages.

Ruby

Developed in 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"), it is a veritable object-oriented scripting language, alongside Perl and Python. Matz wanted to take the name of a gem, just like Perl. After sifting through many names with colleague Keiju Iahitsuka, Coral and Ruby are left. Eventually Ruby was chosen because Perl's pronunciation was the same as the June Birthstone Pearl (Pearl), and Ruby chose to be named after the July birthstone Ruby (Ruby), Matz that Ruby was not just a successor to Perl (Matz thought it was a "toy language") but instead.

Scheme

In the late 1950s, John McCarthy developed the first high-level programming language, Lisp, at MIT. It quickly became the first choice in the field of AI research. Subsequently, many Lisp dialects were born, such as planner and Conniver. In 1975, Gerald Jay Sussman jointly developed another Lisp dialect with the guy Steele at MIT, and named Conniver according to the name of planner and schemer. Unfortunately, when running on its operating system developed by MIT, this system supports up to six characters of file names and is changed to scheme.

Scala

Developed by Martin Odersky in 2001, it is both a functional programming language and an object-oriented feature that runs on the Java platform (earlier. NET platform implementation). The name Scala has two reasons: Scalable LAN two words, in Italian, Scala means "ladder" or "staircase", containing "better programming language."

Scratch

The first edition of the Scratch was developed in 2006 by the MIT Media Lab lifelong kindergarten group, which is a teaching language. Children can complete the programming by dragging and dropping the program modules on the computer screen. It can be used to create novels, movies, games, music and so on, almost everything you can think of it can do. Its name originates from the sound of playing a dish.

Awk

If you've ever used a UNIX system, awk might be more familiar to you. It was developed in 1997 as an explanatory language for working with text files and is one of the most powerful data processing engines available in Linux and UNIX environments. Larry Wall was affected by the development of Perl. The name awk is the same as many language names and is abbreviated, but the three letters are the initials of their invention, the Alfred Aho,peter Weinberger of Bell Labs and Brian Kernighan ().

Groovy

In 2003, Java programmer James Strachan needed a scripting language that was similar to Python and Ruby but could run on the Java platform. So he invented groovy. It can be dynamically compiled into Java bytecode. As James Strachen said, "programming on top of Groovy Java code" is an obvious name.

[Claudio via Network World]

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The origins of the names of 13 programming languages