Very much this. There are so many good names out there left for the taking, there's no reason to choose one that's already associated strongly with another language.
Yes, I know about the earlier ABC. :-)
When I originally named mine, it was really just a small language for my own course, so I wasn't particularly worried about name collisions. And the wordplay was simply too tempting: students would use ABC ("A Better C") to write their own compiler, which I jokingly called ABC ("A Bloody Compiler").
The student compiler has since grown into a separate project and is now called "not-abc".
Until recently I still thought the language itself was small and obscure enough that there wasn't much risk of confusion. But now that I'm starting to develop it beyond its original teaching purpose, I think the naming issue is a fair point. You're also not the first person to bring it up since I published v0.1.
So yes, I may have to come up with a new name. :-) I'm not convinced by LehnABC yet, but suggestions are certainly welcome.
And the timing is probably good. I'm just about to leave my basement and head to LA for a few days to enjoy some actual sunshine. So I'll either turn to ashes or come back with a creative new name. ;-)
A small update on the naming rabbit hole. A few candidates I currently like:
emsiel — pronounced roughly like “M-C-L”. I like how it sounds; several people independently said it sounds vaguely biblical. :-) The downside is that it feels more like the name of a personal project than something inviting people to build a community around.
uhu — “under the hood”. This fits the teaching philosophy quite well: the language/compiler is deliberately small and, more importantly, doesn't try to hide what's going on under the hood.
ijc (“itchsy”) — short for “it’s just C”. It stays conceptually close to C, while using the syntax I wish C had. There's also an accidental “I just see” hiding in the spelling.
At the moment I'm leaning towards ijc, but I'm still not quite ready to rename everything. :-)
