I saw a talk once by Siskind who was a very smart fellow. The origin of the name Stalin in this case came from "Static Language { (I)mplementatio(N) }" in deliberate contrast with "Dylan" [1] which was a more dynamic dialect of Lisp being developed at the time whose principles he disagreed with. I think he worked on Dylan originally, so one could also say he disagreed with the principals as well as the principles. ;-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)