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Ask HN: How do I come up with a name for programming language?
Thank you for the technicalities and legal methods, but I am here for some creative musing. I am currently thinking of 'Anarchy'. The language is heavily mathematical( to put it at best, while at the same time I want to be purposefully vague).
- enkiv2 8y agoThe typical way to pick a name for a language is to choose a dead mathematician who is obscure enough that only mathematicians are familiar with his name (so, no Aristophanes, Euler, or Godel) & who hasn't already had a language named after him. (This worked for Erlang, Church, Haskell, Ada, and a whole host of others.) Another popular way is to take a term from mathematics & misspell it. (See: Clojure, Clozure.) Languages that are derived from other languages often have themed names -- for instance, the various javascript preprocessors have mostly coffee-flavored names, brainfuck derivatives usually include either "brain" or "fuck" in their names, and befunge derivatives usually end with "funge". Sometimes, languages are named after imperative verbs (such as the approximately 3 languages called 'go') or arbitrary physical objects (Rust, Elm). Language-themed language names are popular, too (LISP, SmallTalk, Guile). Languages I've made have been named after fictional characters (MYCROFT, named after the computer from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, himself named after Mycroft Holmes), authors (WILSON, named after Robert Anton Wilson), and descriptive acronyms (GG, the language compiled by GGC, is for generative grammars). Anarchy is a pretty loaded term (and I say that as an anarchist); chances are you'll turn off a lot of people with that name.
- iDemonix 8y agoIt depends what your end goal is. To me, Anarchy reminds me of something like Brainfuck - a hobby project that'll never see serious use. If that's your end goal, call it what you want as there'll never be that many users anyway.
- dman 8y agoPick a boring name. Do not make your adopters fight an uphill battle trying to sell it to non technical decision makers.
- atrocious 8y agoTry smashing bits of related words together. Heavy math: Heath.
- sloaken 8y agotry this name: Sloaken, or the short version Sloak
- Lordarminius 8y agoWhy not Philonist or Philon ?
- LarryMade2 8y agoMathematical + Purposefully Vague ... Infinity
- LarryMade2 8y agoX Y or Z
- DoreenMichele 8y agoArman.
- lsiebert 8y agoI'd use afl or a word mutation engine and the google api, starting with a list of mathematical terms, and mutate them until you got something with zero results that you like. for example z combined with kmeanset as one word in quotes finds no results.
- hood_syntax 8y agoTypic
- slipwalker 8y agoi would go for obscure planet names from star trek universe, and append a "-lang" suffix ( like Brekka-lang ).