One Letter Programming Languages | Hacker News Reader

One Letter Programming Languages

beza1e1.tuxen.de

71 pointsazhenley47 comments

At first, I thought this meant languages where the programming symbols were limited in size to a single letter. I was simultaneously disappointed and relieved.

Edit: and then I got to "O".

You should also look at the second entry for H, then. It's a "language" that pretty much only accepts "h" or "'" as its input.

How about a language named "."? The source code for the "hello, world" program would be in a file called "hello..".

Or Ctrl-G (BEL). Just doing a directory listing would make your terminal beep.

Or LF if you really want to mess up your directory listings.

Or NUL if you just want to make it impossible to create a correctly named source file (unless you consider "hello." to be equivalent to "hello.\0").

The language, where a machine starts with a list of symbols

  +.<>],[!-

and accepts two instructions p and q which apply the permutations

   (+-)(,.)([])(<>)  or  (!.<[+>],-)

respectively and executes the brainfuck instruction given by the second symbol whenever the first symbol is !, doesn't even have a name.

>* (unless you consider "hello." to be equivalent to "hello.\0").*

Even better, some software will consider that valid and other won't, depending on which string handling functions they use to build up the path

On Unix-like systems, you can't use '\0' in a path name. I think that's also the case on Windows. Nor can you use '/', so trying to use that as a file extension would be almost equally silly.

If you allow the Z specification language, you could also add its relative B: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-Method

The claim that G-code is also referred to as the G programming language surprised me. But what do I know.

I worked in a CNC shop for 6 years and never once heard "G programming language"

> Conclusions

> If you are looking for a free name, there is none. However, you can probably overwrite H, I, T, V, or W.

Or, y'know, there's all that unicode...

Can I go ahead and reserve the U+1F60E programming language?

We probably should start an IANA registry... Meanwhile, I call dibs on "🃏" and the ".🃏" file extension, for obvious reasons.

I'm gonna take � while it's still available.

The website author suggests that V is still available since the language is in alpha. In that case, no, you'd better get on writing that interpreter / compiler if you don't want to get scooped.

Plan 9 had alef, after all.

There's a fair bit missing from this; e.g. MUMPS is also known as M, and I believe there's another one known as M as well that isn't here?

The language used by PowerQuery is called M.

The author asks why you would choose a programming language that is impossible to Google, but that's not quite correct: Google has no problem with "D language" or "J language".

The fact that people refer to google's own Go as golang relatively frequently indicates to me that googleable names are important.

These days when I use a language in a query it's usually in combination with something. I might not google go, but I might google go time...

which my test run indicates has an entirely different problem than what I expected, the results are go related - there is a go related podcast called GoTime, funnily enough.

But I've definitely needed to disambiguate programming technologies from entirely different contexts in some queries.

How often do you just Google the name of a programming language, anyway?

And you'd have the same problem if your language were named after a common word like Python or Java.

From about 2003 to 2012 or so I used LaTeX pretty frequently for typesetting and remember occasionally coming across some results that were about a different kind of latex. This doesn't seem to happen any more, from a quick test. But Google knows from my search history that I'm interested in math; a new user might have problems.

These are actually "Programming languages with names that contain a single alphabetic character".

C*, for programming the Connection Machine, is therefore a notable omission.

And then there's the languages named after people, like Ada, Julia or Turbo

Also Pascal and Haskell.

R is named partly after its initial developers, Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka (https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Why-is-R-named...).

Erlang is named after the mathematician Erlang, but also as an abbreviation for "Ericsson Language".

Julia isn't named after anyone in particular. The founders claim it was "just a nice name".

I would've associated it with Julia fractals.

That was not an inspiration according to the language creators.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

What is turbo and who is it named after? I know it's a name but I don't know of anyone with that name who is notable other than like one unpopular saint.

There was a Roman general called Quintus Marcius Turbo.

https://oxfordre.com/classics/view/10.1093/acrefore/97801993...

I was attempting a "turbo pascal" joke

Ah, right, the less famous brother of Blaise Pascal.

Nah, it was his nickname, Blaise "Turbo" Pascal, because he was blaising fast.

Fun fact: Google's original build system was written in Turbo Pascal, though they had to tweak the name due to copyrights or something.

A competing system, Judge "Haskell" Alsup, was unfortunately shot down by lawyers.

Not to forget Linda, named by a scientist nowadays more interested in bewailing the decline of traditional values than in celebrating it.

From there you can branch out to software named after people, like MySQL.

All the letters are taken, but what about the numbers? I'll claim "2" if it's not taken. I can't wait to tell everyone to check out my new language.

Based on a quick look it seems like you can't get domains that are just one number though (like 2.com), is this really the case?

(It's just the binary lambda calculus, but you can use the character '2' as a goto.)

For .com, yes. All the single character .com domains that weren't in use(I think?) were moved to reserved long ago.

Cool article. I wish PL names were more imaginative in general: a single letter is so uninspiring. Naming after famous people (Pascal, Haskell, Ada, Erlang) isn't a bad idea. Failing that there are so many mythological or natural terms that would make good names. (I love how Docker and Kubernetes describe low-tech analogies, though I guess with languages they are harder to find.)

The D programming language was originally named Mars (after my company name Digital Mars). But my friends and colleagues kept jokingly calling it "D" to the point where reality was accepted.

The D standard library is still called Phobos.

Fair enough! Mars would have been great though.

I remember when Zilog tried to trademark the letter Z, and Intel tried to trademark 386.

That didn't work.

(2016)

Here's some related discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11652160

(2020) for this one, similar titles but different authors.

I’m just surprised there’s no The programming language.

But there is a A Programming Language[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

If you've run out of letters in the alphabet, you have diacritical marks at your disposal.

a lot of greek letters seem to have languages as well (at least, alpha, beta, gamma do...I stopped checking after that).

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