Programming Language Naming Patterns

Most of you have noticed that programming language names tend to fall in several different themes. Here is an attempt to catalogue them.

Languages may be placed in more than one category of appropriate; we will not suffer the LimitsOfHierarchies here. Different versions, such as Fortran77 vs Fortran90, and vendor-specific versions, such as VisualFoo?, are valid naming patterns, but aren't very interesting, so they're not being named here.

Acronyms, Abbreviations, and BackroNyms (see AcronymVsAbbreviation):

People: Please make sure you group people based on how it influenced the pattern of naming a language, not necessarily just because people fall into different groups.

MathematiciansWhoHaveLeft:

Mathematicians Who Had/Have Not Left: Initials of the implementor or designer: Other; includes only real persons and not characters in literature. (Brenda moved elsewhere): Names derived from earlier languages:

Names derived from the organization sponsoring development: Food and beverage: Pop culture: Self-descriptive names: Precious objects: History and mythology: Literature: Artificially shortened names: Astronomical Bodies: Not sure how to classify: Emotions: Letters of the alphabet (along with punctuation): Words so short or common that they are little help in narrowing a search engine query (there's no excuse for this in a language named after 2000): "Script" suffix: "Talk" suffix (these names all followed SmallTalk's example): # / .NET suffix: Critters: Trees: Puns and "Geek" jokes: -BOL languages, following the lead of COBOL: ummm... logo, ABC, agile, mumps, chill, squeak, befunge, blue, dylan, godiva, icon, lua, m4, moo, teco http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Programming_language


See also: FutureOpenSourceToolNames


CategoryProgrammingLanguage CategoryWhimsy


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