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I seem to remember you had a clever story behind the name “Hobbes”, but I can’t remember exactly what it was. If you’d care to repeat it here I’d love to be re

• kthielen 7y ago
  Oh, well there are two stories actually. The first story is that it follows the tradition of naming programming languages after logicians/mathematicians (e.g. Haskell, Church, Russell, Pascal, ...). Because the Curry-Howard isomorphism (CH) links logic and programming languages, and ideas in programming languages often come from much older work in logic, it's pretty natural to go to logicians for names (IMHO). Thomas Hobbes was one of the first people to connect logic and computation (literally saying "by reasoning I understand computation") and the logical arithmetic he developed inspired other people to continue that work. I think that story is a reasonable justification, works well for a general audience. The second story (the real story?) is that Morgan Stanley internally has a tradition of naming things after things in popular culture (and at least one or two cartoons), so I named the project after the comic book characters Calvin and Hobbes (CH). Actually the programming language was "Hobbes" and the compiler was "Calvin" because if you know the comic book, Hobbes is really just a figment of Calvin's imagination (which works well to explain how a compiler makes a programming language real). I am a fan of the comics and was reading them frequently with my son at the time. There's a "Calvin and Hobbes ismorphism" (because both characters are different views of the same mind) so it works really well as an extended metaphor for logic and programming languages, I think. :)