That question always comes up, sooner or later. ;-)

I had a plastic toy of Feathers McGraw on my desk, the evil penguin (disguised as a chicken!) from the Wallace and Gromit movie, “The Wrong Trousers.” Looking for a preliminary working title for the compiler, I used the first thing that came to my mind that day. I’m somewhat superstitious about names for software projects, and things were progressing well, so I didn’t dare to change the name.

Also, there is the old philosophical question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? This applies to CHICKEN, too. The compiler is written in Scheme, so you need CHICKEN in order to compile CHICKEN.

http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/19/chicken-scheme-spock...