The name "Ralph" wasn't really secret anymore once Dylan went public, but there also wasn't any particular reason to talk about it. The name of the language was

The name "Ralph" wasn't really secret anymore once Dylan went public, but there also wasn't any particular reason to talk about it. The name of the language was Dylan at that point. Later, as Dylan evolved away from its roots, it made sense to resurrect the old code name to distinguish the Lisp that we used to write a Newton OS from the later non-Lisp that it gradually evolved into. People did know about it, though. One of the links in a sibling comment is to turbolent's little Lisp that compiles to Javascript, named Ralph in homage to the language I used every day back in the early nineties.