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Comment by necovek | Hacker News Reader

Even GNU is a recursive acronym, Emacs a convoluted one... What's Perl, Python, Java... all about? Remember how JavaScript was named? Don't mention Go (go-lang) or Pascal... Git, Mercurial, CVS anyone?

I believe this makes much ado about nothing.

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"Concurrent Versions/Versioning System" is a pretty reasonable one, though.

Then Gimp is also a great name, right? GNU-is-not-Unix Image Manipulation Program: immediatelly obvious what it does as soon as you learn what the acronym stands for.

Or Gtk even: Gnu-is-not-Unix Image Manipulation Program ToolKit (later changed to refer to Gnome instead of Gimp I believe).

and gdk was, delightfully enough, the gnu's not unix image manipulation program toolkit drawing kit

Java is easy - named after the coffee beans of the coffee they used to drink...

CVS (noticed already mentioned by a sibling comment) is just an abbreviation.

Python - well Monty Python

Yes, I am simply highlighting that programmers have not used descriptive names consistently... well, ever (reinforcing the point the GP made).

The entire premise of the OP is simply wrong.

Java was originally called Oak but its creator because he could see an oak from his office, but marketing people at Sun thought Java would be more catchy. Yes it's named after coffee beans, but it has no relation whatsoever to the language or the way it was created, it's just a marketing name.

Imagine a parallel world in which Java is called Oak and it's actually nice from inception, not just like nice after decades.

compared to C, java was quite nice

I can totally see how that was an obvious decision in the 90s, the coffee shop craze was just taking hold in America, and it was such an exciting and fashionable thing to do to sip espressos and lattes.

And before the rise of heavy IDE, you need some coffee to write all those SomeObscureWord.longLongStuf.notSoShortOne.LastSentence()

Pascal is probably the most sensible name, as far as traditional naming schemes go. Names after Blaise Pascal, mathematician and one of the two inventors of the mechanical calculator. Pretty fair association and tribute.

Git as a name is our daily reminder that pre-mainstream programmers were rebellious against the mainstream (to put it as generously as I could) before corporate interests took over. but i encourwge you to look up that story yourself.

>Git

The stupid content tracker.

Still one of my favourite names.

The 2000s Plan9 community asserts "Gnu is Not Useful" as the correct expansion.

It would be funny if I did not run GNU/Linux as a daily driver since 1998: Plan9 did look interesting too, and compared to GNU/Hurd, it was certainly in a better shape.

(Even Solaris, *BSDs already started including GNU tools, compilers...)

Perl stands for “practical extraction and report language”

Also "pathlogically eclectic rubbish lister".

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