[HN Gopher] One Letter Programming Languages
___________________________________________________________________
One Letter Programming Languages
Author : azhenley
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-04-14 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (beza1e1.tuxen.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (beza1e1.tuxen.de)
| self_buddliea wrote:
| If you've run out of letters in the alphabet, you have
| diacritical marks at your disposal.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I remember when Zilog tried to trademark the letter Z, and Intel
| tried to trademark 386.
|
| That didn't work.
| cozzyd wrote:
| a lot of greek letters seem to have languages as well (at least,
| alpha, beta, gamma do...I stopped checking after that).
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| There's a fair bit missing from this; e.g. MUMPS is also known as
| M, and I believe there's another one known as M as well that
| isn't here?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The language used by PowerQuery is called M.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| If you allow the Z specification language, you could also add its
| relative B: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-Method
|
| The claim that G-code is also referred to as the G programming
| language surprised me. But what do I know.
| improv32 wrote:
| I worked in a CNC shop for 6 years and never once heard "G
| programming language"
| argvargc wrote:
| At first, I thought this meant languages where the programming
| symbols were limited in size to a single letter. I was
| simultaneously disappointed and relieved.
|
| Edit: and then I got to "O".
| anyfoo wrote:
| You should also look at the second entry for H, then. It's a
| "language" that pretty much only accepts "H" or "'" as its
| input.
| argvargc wrote:
| h
| zeckalpha wrote:
| I'm just surprised there's no The programming language.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2016)
|
| Here's some related discussion
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11652160
| Jtsummers wrote:
| (2020) for this one, similar titles but different authors.
| klyrs wrote:
| > Conclusions
|
| > If you are looking for a free name, there is none. However, you
| can probably overwrite H, I, T, V, or W.
|
| Or, y'know, there's all that unicode...
| Semiapies wrote:
| Plan 9 had alef, after all.
| azhenley wrote:
| Can I go ahead and reserve the U+1F60E programming language?
| klyrs wrote:
| The website author suggests that V is still available since
| the language is in alpha. In that case, no, you'd better get
| on writing that interpreter / compiler if you don't want to
| get scooped.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| I'm gonna take while it's still available.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| We probably should start an IANA registry... Meanwhile, I
| call dibs on "" and the "." file extension, for obvious
| reasons.
| gumby wrote:
| These are actually "Programming languages with names that contain
| a single alphabetic character".
|
| C*, for programming the Connection Machine, is therefore a
| notable omission.
| _kst_ wrote:
| How about a language named "."? The source code for the "hello,
| world" program would be in a file called "hello..".
|
| Or Ctrl-G (BEL). Just doing a directory listing would make your
| terminal beep.
|
| Or LF if you really want to mess up your directory listings.
|
| Or NUL if you just want to make it impossible to create a
| correctly named source file (unless you consider "hello." to be
| equivalent to "hello.\0").
| akiselev wrote:
| >* (unless you consider "hello." to be equivalent to
| "hello.\0").*
|
| Even better, some software will consider that valid and other
| won't, depending on which string handling functions they use to
| build up the path
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Cool article. I wish PL names were more imaginative in general: a
| single letter is so uninspiring. Naming after famous people
| (Pascal, Haskell, Ada, Erlang) isn't a bad idea. Failing that
| there are so many mythological or natural terms that would make
| good names. (I love how Docker and Kubernetes describe low-tech
| analogies, though I guess with languages they are harder to
| find.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| The D programming language was originally named Mars (after my
| company name Digital Mars). But my friends and colleagues kept
| jokingly calling it "D" to the point where reality was
| accepted.
|
| The D standard library is still called Phobos.
| not2b wrote:
| The author asks why you would choose a programming language that
| is impossible to Google, but that's not quite correct: Google has
| no problem with "D language" or "J language".
| madcaptenor wrote:
| How often do you just Google the name of a programming
| language, anyway?
|
| And you'd have the same problem if your language were named
| after a common word like Python or Java.
|
| From about 2003 to 2012 or so I used LaTeX pretty frequently
| for typesetting and remember _occasionally_ coming across some
| results that were about a different kind of latex. This doesn
| 't seem to happen any more, from a quick test. But Google knows
| from my search history that I'm interested in math; a new user
| might have problems.
| Macha wrote:
| The fact that people refer to google's own Go as golang
| relatively frequently indicates to me that googleable names are
| important.
|
| These days when I use a language in a query it's usually in
| combination with something. I might not google go, but I might
| google go time...
|
| which my test run indicates has an entirely different problem
| than what I expected, the results are go related - there is a
| go related podcast called GoTime, funnily enough.
|
| But I've definitely needed to disambiguate programming
| technologies from entirely different contexts in some queries.
| m463 wrote:
| And then there's the languages named after people, like Ada,
| Julia or Turbo
| eigenspace wrote:
| Julia isn't named after anyone in particular. The founders
| claim it was "just a nice name".
| m463 wrote:
| That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| What is turbo and who is it named after? I know it's a name but
| I don't know of anyone with that name who is notable other than
| like one unpopular saint.
| m463 wrote:
| I was attempting a "turbo pascal" joke
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Ah, right, the less famous brother of Blaise Pascal.
| samatman wrote:
| Nah, it was his nickname, Blaise "Turbo" Pascal, because
| he was blaising fast.
| yongjik wrote:
| Fun fact: Google's original build system was written in
| Turbo Pascal, though they had to tweak the name due to
| copyrights or something.
|
| A competing system, Judge "Haskell" Alsup, was
| unfortunately shot down by lawyers.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| From there you can branch out to software named after people,
| like MySQL.
| microtherion wrote:
| Not to forget Linda, named by a scientist nowadays more
| interested in bewailing the decline of traditional values than
| in celebrating it.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Also Pascal and Haskell.
|
| R is named partly after its initial developers, Robert
| Gentleman and Ross Ihaka
| (https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Why-is-R-
| named...).
|
| Erlang is named after the mathematician Erlang, but also as an
| abbreviation for "Ericsson Language".
| Y_Y wrote:
| All the letters are taken, but what about the numbers? I'll claim
| "2" if it's not taken. I can't wait to tell everyone to check out
| my new language.
|
| Based on a quick look it seems like you can't get domains that
| are just one number though (like 2.com), is this really the case?
|
| (It's just the binary lambda calculus, but you can use the
| character '2' as a goto.)
| axaxs wrote:
| For .com, yes. All the single character .com domains that
| weren't in use(I think?) were moved to reserved long ago.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-14 23:02 UTC)