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Comment by Nullabillity | Hacker News Reader

What's with all the single-character name programming languages? It's almost as if they're trying to make it a pain to search for.

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I guess they went the theory it's the next letter after C in BCPL as B and C exist.

Or just P for parallel. Safe, parallel, asynchronous programming in higher-level language with code generation. As opposite of BCPL and C as you can get.

Then why is "D" not called "P" ? What happens when we reach L?

No more new programming languages. Can't do it.

One could use another alphabet or writing system

Does anybody know programming languages called or 𓀀 or 𐎯 or ণ or ဏ or Ꮊ or שׂ or ಠ or 𐦂 or ᛝ or ܟ or ⌨ or ?

Seems like Google handles unicode characters, so those would be as good as any (I guess as long as it's a symbol people actually know how to pronounce). Something like Ω-lang or ∞-lang would be nice.

Actually, there are already four languages called L.

I, N, O, and V are still available. H, T, and W can probably be overwritten without hurting anybody. http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/one_letter_proglangs.html

In Germany, we have Umlaute - Ä, Ö, and Ü. Plus ß, but I am not sure if that counts as a letter.

But having a programming language named Ä seems worth the effort. :-)

D is clearly trying to break away from the BCPL > B > C heritage just as C++ didn't merit a new letter. Since D is trying to be more logical, it went with the logical incremental letter.

they could make it a onomatopoeia and call it PeeLanguage

G -> GooLanguage ? :-)

Usually you can just search for languages with weird unsearchable names as "*lang".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language) (Not really sure how you'd search for this language in particular, though...)

"rlang" is not really fun to search for either

It's pretty easy to find with "p programming language".

What if you have a stutter?

Lol, just tried 'plang', found this... whatever it is:

"PlanG offers a system to infuse and promote social impact within brands and develop loyalty through emotional connections with customers."

Nothing is as bad as C#. E.g. try it on remoteok.io. They're not the only ones who can't search it. Even Google couldn't a few years back IIRC.

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