Those interesting names in programming languages

When learning Nodejs, you will definitely use the Package Manager NPM. NPM literally means node Package Manager, but the real English name of NPM is "NPM isn't an acronym", meaning "NPM isn't an abbreviation", so if you ask what the abbreviation for NPM is, then the answer is "' NPM is not an abbreviation for ' the abbreviation '.

This "rap" phenomenon in computer science is called recursive abbreviation.

The recursive abbreviation (Recursive acronym) is a recursive acronym, which is a recursive reference to its own abbreviation in the full name.

In the computer field, the use of recursive abbreviations is a hacker community in an earlier tradition, and then some cattle people to develop their own products or technologies used in this way to name, it must be said that cattle are not only technical cows, open jokes are also full of geek breath.

The oldest recursive abbreviation named instance should be the TINT editor that appeared in 1977 or 1978, named "TINT is not TECO" (TINT are not text editors and modifiers), which is a magicsix editor. It also inspired the naming of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's two Lisp machine editor, one called EINE ("EINE isn't Emacs", EINE not Emacs) and the other ZWEI ("ZWEI was EINE initially", ZWEI opened Started as eine). Familiar with the Linux children's shoes must be not unfamiliar to GNU, Richard Stallman's GNU (GNU's not Unix,gnu is not UNIX) is also so humorous. Like NPM and GNU, many recursive abbreviations include negative words, which are often used to point out that the abbreviation refers to something that is not similar to another (but in fact, the thing A is usually very similar to B or even a derivative of B).

There are some interesting examples:

Linux:linux is not UniX, which is a bit like GNU, but whether it is true is still to be verified.

PHP: Formerly Personal Home page, just beginning is Rasmus Lerdorf in order to maintain personal web site developed, later powerful, renamed Php:hypertext Preprocessor, the corresponding meaning has become a hypertext preprocessor.

RPM:RPM Package Manager, formerly known as Red Hat Pack Manager, is a packaging and installation tool for Internet downloads, which is included in some Linux distributions. It generates a. RPM file extension. Similar to dpkg.

Wine:wine is a Emulator, a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on a variety of posix-compliant operating systems such as Linux,mac OSX and BSD. With regard to the true meaning of wine, some people questioned the saying that "the wine is not a Emulator", that the explanation of "non-simulator" is only a kind of entertaining saying, wine's real meaning should be the abbreviation of Windows environment, namely wine.

Png:png's not GIF, an image file storage format designed to attempt to replace GIF and TIFF file formats while adding features not available in the GIF file format. The name of the PNG is derived from the Portable Network Graphics format (Portable networks Graphic format,png),

Emacs-emacs makes A computer Slow, the meaning of self-ridicule is too obvious, it is probably the powerful function of their own complacent.

Understand these things, on the one hand in learning sleepy when a slight adjustment, on the other hand is also experienced computer geek humor, boring computer world needs programmers to create happiness.

Original link: Those interesting naming in programming languages

Those interesting names in programming languages