How to choose a language name
This won’t be of much interest to many folk, but four of the original designers of the Haskell programming language are currently writing a paper on the history of the language. Drafts are available to read on the Haskell website, but for those less motivated I thought I would highlight the important section - how they chose the name:
[A] small but important moment in any language’s evolution is the moment it is named. At the Yale meeting we used the following process (suggested by Wadler) for choosing the name. Anyone could propose one or more names for the language, which were all written on a blackboard. At the end of this process, the following names appeared: Semla, Haskell, Vivaldi, Mozart, CFL (Common Functional Language), Funl 88, Semlor, Candle (Common Applicative Notation for Denoting Lambda Expressions), Fun, David, Nice, Light, ML Nouveau (or Miranda Nouveau, or LML Nouveau, or …), Mirabelle, Concord, LL, Slim, Meet, Leval, Curry, Frege, Peano, Ease, Portland, and Haskell B Curry. After considerable discussion about the various names, each person was then free to cross out a name that he disliked. When we were done, there was one name left.
That name was “Curry,” in honour of the mathematician and logician Haskell B. Curry, whose work had led, variously and indirectly, to our presence in that room. That night, two of us realised that we would be left with a lot of curry puns (aside from the spice, and the thought of currying favour, the one that truly horrified us was Tim Curry - TIM was Jon Fairbairn’s abstract machine, and Tim Curry was famous for playing the lead in the Rocky Horror Picture Show). So the next day, after some further discussion, we settled on “Haskell” as the name for the new language. Only later did we realise that this was too easily confused with Pascal or Hassle!