Hacker News Reader

Comment by Meph504 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder where the divide of "shebang" vs "hashbang" lands geographically and chronologically, During college and for many years in the early 90s and 2000s in the south it commonly called hashbang, didn't hear shebang until C# became a thing, I know it predates that, just never heard it before then.

View on HN

I believe the dividing moment came with Ricky Martin circa 2000.

Lame joke aside, I only heard "shebang" prior to around that time, then "hashbang" and now I get a mix of it. Google trends indicates "shebang" always dominated.

It's kind of the same with the # symbol. I call it the pound sign but some people call it hash.

In my head I translate an old Swedish term: "timber yard" (from Brädgård). Everything to make interacting with other hard I guess. As a kid we also called it staket, which translates to "fence".

I can see the fence and timber yard imagery.

Interesting, I’ve never even heard it called “hashbang” until you just did.

California, 40yo fwiw

I was a Unix sysadmin back in the late 90’s in east coast US and we called it a shebang when writing shell or perl scripts

I always found it interesting as the sharp term including C# was odd because it isn't the sharp symbol, which is ♯. All of them use the # hash character, so calling it sharp always seemed odd to me, though C-Hash also doesn't roll of the tongue admittedly. It is also interesting how hash is correctly used in some places "Hash Tag" but not others.

Indeed. I joked on slashdot that C# was pronounced “cash” back when it was first announced, which seemed appropriate given the company.

The joke didn’t land, sadly.

It lands for me, today :)

In 2010 I met a person from India who pronounced it "C pound", and they were as confused by my reaction as I was by their pronunciation. I guess somehow that pronunciation became popular enough that it acquired momentum and everyone in their circle (or maybe all of India?) assumed it was correct. The # key on the phone is called the "pound key" in India, which is where it would've started from, and I guess they never heard any foreigner Youtube video etc pronouncing it.

I don't know if they still pronounce it that way or not.

I was always partial to "C octothorpe".

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/octothorpe

The "#" key on the phone is called the "pound key" in the US and Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#Names

It still is, to this day: if you call an automated system such as voicemail, you may be prompted to "press 'pound'". This is really standardized, AFAICT, and no telephone system has told me to "press hash" or "press the 'number' key" [because that's ambiguous]

cks has a history of #! but not an etymology: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ExecAndShebang...

He links to Wikipedia which documents a good history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)#History

I was trying to recall what we called it. I used SVR3, so I would've been using "#!/bin/sh" as early as 1990, and even more on SunOS 4 and other Unix servers.

I can't recall having a name for it until "hash-bang" gained currency later. We knew it was activated by the magic(5) kernel interpretations. I often called "#" as "pound" from the telephone usage, and I recall being tempted to verbalize it in C64 BASIC programming, or shell comment characters, but knowing it was not the same.

"The whole shebang" is a Civil-War-era American idiom that survived with my grandparents, so I was familiar with that meaning. And not really paying attention to Ricky Martin's discography.

Wikipedia says that Larry Wall used it in 1989. I was a fervent follower of Larry Wall in the mid-90s and Perl was my #1 scripting language. If anyone would coin and/or popularize a term like that, it's Just Another Perl Hacker,

Likewise, "bang" came from the "bang path" of UUCP email addresses, or it stood for "not" in C programming, and so "#!/bin/sh" was ambiguously nameless for me, perhaps for a decade.

Come to think of it, vi and vim have a command "!" where you can filter your text through a shell command, or "shell out" from other programs. This is the semantic that makes sense for hash-bangs, but which came first?

> "bang" came from the "bang path" of UUCP email addresses

"Bang" was in common use by computer users around 1970 when I was working at Tymshare. On the SDS/XDS Sigma 7, there was a command you could use from a Teletype to send a message to the system operator on their Teletype in the computer room. I may have this detail wrong, but I seem to recall that it included your username as a prefix, maybe like this:

  GEARY: CAN YOU LOAD TAPE XYZ FOR ME?

What I do remember clearly is that there were also messages originated by the OS itself, and those began with "!!", which we pronounced "bang bang". Because who would ever want to say "exclamation point exclamation point"?

The reason this is vivid in my mind is that I eventually found the low-level system call to let me send "system" messages myself. So I used it to prank the operator once in a while with this message:

  !! UNDETECTABLE ERROR

I was proud of calling it an "undetectable" error. If it was undetectable, how did the OS detect it?

I started using C# towards the end of the 1.0 beta or maybe just after RTM...I embarrassingly called it "C pound" for quite a while. Because, even as someone born and raised in the US, pretty much my only exposure to the symbol was in the context of phones. "Call me at blah, pound one-two-three" as in the extension is "#123".

Remember, it was originally release +20 years ago (goddamn, I feel old now); recorded video or even audio over the internet were much, much, MUCH rarer then, when "high-speed" speed internet for a lot of people meant a 56K modem.

Back then, most developer's first exposure to C# then was likely in either print form (books or maybe MSDN magazine).

Not alone, also got those CDs for MSFT partners only, with the draft documentation written in red, before it became know to the outside world?

Also got a few of those magazine CDs, in some box.

It's supposed to be the sharp symbol; it's just that it was a hassle for them to use it consistently in paths etc, so they defaulted to # as a stand-in.

It's "sharp" (i.e. higher tone) because it's a higher-level language compared to C and C++.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com