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Comment by coderespawn | Hacker News Reader

what does PLT stand for?

It's a term used far more by enthusiasts than by actual PL researchers. It supposedly stands for "theory," but that confuses the wide range of PL research, some of which is theory, but much of which is not. There's a very good discussion about this from several years ago on Lambda the Ultimate:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3219#comment-47424

Programming language theory i guess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory

Ah, thanks! While reading the page I switched between thinking that it was a Racket competition http://plt-scheme.org/ and some loose-defined everything-goes competition. It makes more sense now. Acronyms!

Actually the "PLT" of PLT Scheme also stands for Programming Languages Theory, since it was the name of the research group which developped it in the first place (now the PLT group is spread across multiple university).

"PLT was an acronym for some 30 minutes. It was coined in response to a request by Ken Kennedy to distinguish our group from the compiler group. The "T" never stood for theory because we never identified our work with plain language theory.

I could make up a lie on how to spell out PLT and what it stood for in those 30 minutes, but I'd rather just leave this in the dustbin of history.

The people who maintain PLT Scheme now are the very same people who started the project at Rice in January 1995 (two days after POPL to be precise). By the time I left Rice for Northeastern in 2001, Cormac, Matthew, and Shriram had graduated; all other PLT students moved with me, including Paul Steckler our research scientist. The only person not to move along was Mario Latendresse, who went to California for personal reasons.

-- Matthias Felleisen, who coined the term"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Racket_(programming_langua...

Oh okay, I never read that anywhere before today and since the PLT group is rather active in prog lang theorory conferences I guess I've always assumed it was the meaning of PLT. Thanks for the correction.

If you read the link dherman points to up-thread, I explain why I think PLT is a bad name, even independent of the confusion with my research group.

In my university, the compilers class was (and is) known as PLT - Programming Languages & Translators. I sort of always assumed that was the meaning, since it feels natural - you have one half side of the coin (the languages) and then the other (the interpreters, compilers, and other forms of code translation).

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