Actually, before the modern programming languages (say pre-1990 for simplicity), "perl" was just as common a word as "java" (though falling), and at one point "

Actually, before the modern programming languages (say pre-1990 for simplicity), "perl" was just as common a word as "java" (though falling), and at one point "miranda" was substantially more so. "pearl" is only around 100x more common than "perl". "basic" is certainly FAR more common than any of the above, including "pearl". http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=java%2Cperl%2Cmiranda&year_start=1800&year_end=1990&corpus=15&smoothing=5 http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=java%2Cperl%2Cm... I'll assume you've never knitted.