Ask HN: How do I come up with a name for programming language? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I come up with a name for programming language?

5 pointsphilonoist14 comments

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).

View on HN

The 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.

I'd go with the matematician, Cardano. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerolamo_Cardano

I wouldn't go with the one with a cryptocurrency named after him.

Pick a boring name. Do not make your adopters fight an uphill battle trying to sell it to non technical decision makers.

It 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.

I'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.

Try smashing bits of related words together. Heavy math: Heath.

i would go for obscure planet names from star trek universe, and append a "-lang" suffix ( like Brekka-lang ).

Why not Philonist or Philon ?

Mathematical + Purposefully Vague ...

Infinity

X Y or Z

try this name: Sloaken, or the short version Sloak

Typic

Arman.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com