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Comment by lowdose | Hacker News Reader

Pretty bold name when you think about it. Could it be that the name association had a negative impact on implementation by others?

> The program was called “MrEd” because it was mostly an editor. I liked the “Mr” part and didn’t mind that it was already the name of a talking horse.

> I called it "Ms. Scheme", but since "Ms" seemed too likely to suggest "Microsoft", spelled it "MzScheme".

Naming is important, you shouldn't name a program MrEd nor should a language go by the name MzScheme when you want people to take your work serious.

Edit: delete sentence "Start a project and call it a racket from day one"

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There was a tradition of such self-deprecating names for lisp dialects specifically -- an early system called PLANNER had an offshoot which was named CONNIVER, and SCHEME itself was another branch off this tree (originally named SCHEMER, and truncated because the MIT AI lab's homebrew ITS timesharing system limited filenames to six characters). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)

Also in that list is MDL or MUDDLE. This is the language that ZORK was written in.

Also Will Clinger's Larceny.

Or Stalin, the Scheme compiler that "brutally optimizes".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_(Scheme_implementation)

The question still stands if insider jokes are an efficient source of inspiration for naming your work.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it in this and other threads.

Fair enough.

The answer is: yes.

Some examples:

- Python comes from Monty Python

- Ruby is inspired by Perl but according Wikipedia chosen because of a bright stone used by one of the authors colleagues

- Smalltalk was chosen by Alan Kay to avoid a god-like name and lower expectations (see The Early History of Smalltalk)

- Lua is a Portuguese word for Moon, because of a previous project named SOL (sun)

I can continue with Pascal, Ada, and Haskell based on people names. Also with Java (maybe inspired by a coffee store), C (which is not even a word), D...

The point is: systems and programming languages are made by people. Good naming is important for function/operators/libraries because they play a part in system comprehension. But, otherwise having a “fun” name reflects the humane part of the creation :)

SOL does indeed mean "Sun", but was actually an acronym for "Simple Object Language". It in turn was the successor to DEL (defined as a "dialog specification language", but that would be DSL in English or LED in Portuguese so I haven't figured that out). Anyway, having an acronym that is also a relevant word or name is a popular thing to do.

The Wolfram Language is named after the author. The closest to that I can think of is Algol-W by Niklaus Wirth and Tony Hoare (that is if the W is for Wirth at all, which I couldn't verify). Are there any other cases?

Another case is AWK named after the surnames of the authors.

"I would recommend not wasting any more time on the naming issue. (This is a recurring theme in my posts -- remember, I spent about 0.3 microseconds thinking about whether "Python" would be a good name for a programming language, and I've never regretted it.)" -- Guido van Rossum, 25 Nov 1998.

It's a catchy name that's fun to say. Being an amusing pun only makes it better. So the answer is yes, it's a wonderful name for a scheme.

The name MrEd was also an in-joke because Matthias Felleisen was notoriously anti-TV, so his students thought it fun to sneak in a TV reference.

Lots of the old subsystems had prefixed-names. MrEd and MzScheme begat DrScheme; others include SrPersist (Sister Persist) and FrTime (Father Time). We built a debugger called MzTake ("when you make a mistake, use MzTake"). My favorite is an IRC client that Robby Findler wrote called MzCommunication.

It wasn't from "day one". The name Racket is only about 10 years old. It started life as PLT Scheme.

A racket is a kind of scheme.

EDIT: You've edited your post to include more ridiculous assertions.

Python was literally named after Monty Python.

You know what, whatever, I'm not playing this stupid game.

> A racket is a kind of scheme.

That's hilarious. It only took me 5 years to get.

Guile makes sense now too.

'Gambit Scheme' has a similar style of name.

Gambit Scheme is also a pun on Marc Feeley's surname in Irish -- O Fithcheallaigh -- which means 'chess player'. The name is derived from the ancient Irish board game fidchell, rules unknown, but taken to be akin to chess.

https://www.libraryireland.com/names/of/o-fithcheallaigh.php

That's a bit different. Guy Steele's first Scheme compiler was called RABBIT (it ran fast). The Yale T project created the Orbit compiler. This set off a *bit trend, including Gambit and also Will Clinger's Twobit.

In fact, that's clarified in the very next sentence of the article.

You are right that I removed in sentence because I read to quick but the whole article is about naming. Is it so strange to comment on specific names? I don't think the authors could have done worst.

Synonyms for racket: haphazardness, disagreement, noise, stochasticity, interference, dissonance, dissension, fraudulent scheme, disturbance, randomness, illegitimate enterprise.

You don’t think they could have done worse? I present to you “Brainfuck”.

This is an odd hill you’re choosing to die on.

I mean, the creators of Brainfuck weren't exactly aiming for widespread adoption.

> fraudulent scheme

It's a joke.

You know it's also the name of a sporting good, right? There's this game called tennis. Quite popular, can be fun to play and to watch. You should check it out.

I don't know why "application performance" is brought up here, do you mean adoption?

I think Racket is a pretty bad choice, I'm from Italy and here you find that word in news about mafia and organized crime, so imagine the kind of association it bears with it.

Naming things is hard, but sometimes hackers seem to choose to make it harder... https://racket-lang.org/new-name.html

I'm also from Italy and you know perfectly well that nobody even aware of the existence of Scheme dialects would be confused by this.

And what about people without any knowledge of Scheme dialects? (Let's call them, for the sake of brevity "CS juniors".)

Consequently, Doom and Quake are banned from your household in favor of Animal Crossing?

I presume you refuse to play tennis, then, solo calcio.

Uhm, I wonder how would people from this village comment on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking,_Austria

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