"In 15th-century English, "Nimrod" had come to mean tyrant"
"In 20th-century American English, the term is now commonly used to mean a dimwitted or a stupid person."
I could see how you wouldn't want your programming language to be considered a tyrant or a dimwit.
Or a dimwitted tyrant. ;-)
Bugs Bunny taunted Elmer Fudd, a stupid an incompetent hunter that failed to catch Bugs Bunny, by calling him a Nimrod. But the children who watched Loony Tunes didn't get the joke and so they assumed it was a synonym for "stupid and incompetent."
Imagine that in the future people think that that "Einstein" means "imbecile" because "you're a regular Einstein" was an ironic taunt. It's the same idea.
In tech marketing, taking a brand that's been invested in and renaming it for no good reason is something you should be loath to do, as it throws away the value and associations that exist with the current brand.
Among the typical "good reasons" for changing the name in are: 1) the brand has been diminished by some bad news / negagive attention and so they're rebranding; 2) the brand causes confusion with other products; 3) legal reasons; 4) some other well-defined limitation that makes growth impossible.
Without having any more insight into the reasons behind this, it's hard to see whether this is a good move or the beginning of a decline for Nimrod as a concept.
That's not true; every mathematician knows the game of Nim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim (_asummers points this out below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352021). I agree that it's a pretty neutral association, but, then again, did the name 'Nimrod' ever really have anything to do with the language? (I don't know.)
> Extra-biblical traditions associating him with the Tower of Babel led to his reputation as a king who was rebellious against God.
It can't hurt and Nim is a short and memorable name. Realistically it will probably have very little impact (and the core devs likely know this). Whether Nim gains widespread adoption has a lot more to do with whether it can compete successfully with Rust, C++, or whatever is remotely similar to it. D, for example, has a really good name (the successor to C), but hasn't become heavily used in industry despite what advantages it does have and years of development.
I hear it all the time. Probably nearly daily. It depends on your circles, I suppose.
What portion of the US do you live in?
Also, wasn't there a living-metal future-sentinel type thing in the X-Men stories that was called Nimrod and was pretty terrifying?