There is also C#, where # represents a duplication of "++", on top of each other. Technically, the # is not the sign for the musical sharp key (♯), but "C sharp" sounds better than "C hash", "C pound" or "C octothorp". :)
Edit: On an unrelated note, TIL that the sign used on telephone keys is also not #, but ⌗ -- a.k.a. the "Viewdata square" [0].
Don Syme is a pretty cool guy from what I’ve seen online too. He enjoyed supporting and attending Migrateful (UK charity where refugees/asylum seekers teach cooking classes) which I’m appreciative of in particular.
System F is a polymorphic lambda calculus, it's more theoretical than practical (typing must be explicit or type inference may be impossible) but a restriction of its typing scheme is one you may have heard of, and the Hindley-Milner type inference algorithm works for it.
"The key labeled was officially named the "star" key. The key labeled # is officially called the "number sign" key, but other names such as "pound", "hash", "hex", "octothorpe", "gate", "lattice", and "square", are common, depending on national or personal preference. The Greek symbols alpha and omega had been planned originally."
Wolfram: Named after Stephen Wolfram, by Stephen Wolfram
Does anyone else think it's a bit too much to name something after yourself? Even in math and physics, scientists often don't name it after themselves—their colleagues do it to give credit where it's due (e.g., Colomb's law, Planck's constant, etc.)
I suppose it's quite widely known where "JavaScript" comes from, but seeing it next to all the others and how they were named on the list, it seems like the... saddest etymology of them all.
> The original name SEQUEL, which is widely regarded as a pun on QUEL, the query language of Ingres, was later changed to SQL (dropping the vowels) because "SEQUEL" was a trademark of the UK-based Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Engineering Limited company. The label SQL later became the acronym for Structured Query Language.
Scheme: Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele were working on a followup to Conniver, which they called Schemer, but but the machine they were working with only allowed 6-character names.
(it's actually a reference to the Parable of the Pearl, but that name clashed with PEARL, a real-time programming language from the 70s developed in Germany)
Fitting with the whole point of C++ where the original design philosophy was to provide language features that you wouldn't have to pay for (in performance cost) if you didn't use them.
I think that list is limited to languages whose name comes from real life entities, and optionally with an interesting story behind. Names like "SQL" or "C" are more like pure knowledge rather nice good gossip.
Everyone around Walter Bright kept calling it D because it was a modern language with C-like syntax. Thus, D the next letter in the alphabet and eventually Walter gave in. :)
There also is C--. C-- is a reduced kind of C to make implementation of compilers and interpreters for it easier. It is overall meant as a simple generation target for compilers.
Here's a few more of the top of my head, feel free to expand the list! :
C: a successor to B, itself derived from BCPL.
C++: increments over C.
D: a successor to C.
LISP: LISt Processor.
FORTRAN: FORmula TRANslator.
ALGOL: ALGorithmic Language.
Prolog: PROgrammation LOGique (logic programming in French).
PHP: initially PHP/FI for "Personal Home Page Form Interpreter", later rebranded as "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".
JavaScript: named this way to be associated with the popularity of Java.
Ada: in honor of Ada Lovelace.
OCaml: initially Objective Caml, because it added OOP support among other things.
Caml: Categorical Abstract Machine Language.
ML (as in SML): Meta Language.
SQL: Structured Query Language.