
One-letter programming languages - phantom_oracle
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2854597/its-the-attack-of-the-one-letter-programming-languages.html?page=2
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riffraff
first thing I noticed: missing E!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_\(programming_language\))

~~~
sndean
Looks like [1] the only letters not yet taken are: H, I, N, O, U, V, W, Y, and
Z? Changes depending on whether you're allowing characters.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages)

~~~
wrp
Somebody once had a hobby project of a stack-based language called V. Can't
find it now.

I don't think anybody could use Z, since the Z formal notation is too well
known.

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88e282102ae2e5b
I really wish modern language creators would take googleability into account
when naming their languages. Even with rust, I occasionally have to use
"rustlang" to avoid result pages with mostly plumbing sites, I imagine the
situation is far worse for D, F and M.

~~~
Razengan
Does anyone remember what that was like when the .NET framework first came
out? It's literally just a TLD..

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giancarlostoro
To this day I wonder why they chose .NET I can only think of Passport.NET
which is likely pointless by now.

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josteink
It was all about showing how network enabled and service oriented your were.

Back in those days people were still pushing XML web services, SOAP and UDDI
like it was the goodest thing possible.

.NET was about showing how everything .net was all those things, kinda.

Basically marketing meets tech hype 101.

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k__
"a manager counted the lines of software coming out of the cubicle farm and
determined that programmers wrote N lines of code a day. It didn't make a
difference what language was used -- the company would get only N lines out of
them. The manager promptly embraced APL, the tersest, most powerful language
around"

They can only do N lines, so the natural decision was to use terser languages,
I love it.

I mean, yes there are reasons to use a special language for a problem (for
example Elixir instead of Ruby, for distributed systems). Also sometimes some
problems get solved more elegant in newer languages (Rust instead of C++ for
system programming).

But if the only metric is lines of code, every language solves this with
enough abstraction layers...

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eru
Just the opposite. If you figure out the number of lines of code is constant,
like the alleged manager, you can start taking it as a constraint and
optimizing for other things.

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humanrebar
It's odd that F# is covered, but not C#, Objective-C, or especially C++. It
was especially odd to read the description of D without C++ being named. The
inclusion of RAII in D is a dead giveaway of its inspiration.

~~~
tux
C# = 2 (letter + symbol), Objective-C = 11 (10 letters + 1 symbol), C++ = 3 (1
letter + 2 symbols) so its not odd :-)

~~~
zodiac
Then why was F# included?

~~~
tux
I think they wanted to post "F" but posted "F#" :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_\(programming_language\))

Not to be confused with F Sharp (programming language).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_\(programming_language\))

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alva
Missed out q!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(programming_language_from_K...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_\(programming_language_from_Kx_Systems\))

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fxn
I am sorry, those are programming languages whose name has one letter.

For a true one-letter programming language please check SuperPython
[http://search.cpan.org/~mjd/SuperPython-0.91/SuperPython.pm](http://search.cpan.org/~mjd/SuperPython-0.91/SuperPython.pm).

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pvitz
Btw. does anybody know what happened to kOS or z? I can't find anything on
kparc.com anymore.

~~~
wrp
KxCon2016 is coming up May 19-22. Arthur Whitney is scheduled to give a
presentation on K6. You might try asking on the Kdb+ Personal Developers
Google group afterwards.

~~~
pvitz
Thanks!

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mseepgood
"Long ago, when Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, aka K&R, set out to write
Unix".

Unix was created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie.

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stepvhen
A little unfair that they write the K program out when finding primes smaller
than a number is a J primitive.

