Monday, July 2, 2007

A Name for Rebol 3.0

Now that Rebol 3.0 is in alpha, I feel some concern that a re-naming could be in the offing.
Rebol emerged from Lava. The great thing is that any google on "Rebol" is a fruitful google.
Just suppose that your interest is music and the Oz compiler named Mozart...

That a language called "Stockhausen" could reemerge as "Alice" might amuse.

But it is vexing to search for "io" as a language (it is a language, as was Icon.)

There were silly, ill-timed names: calling the new APL by "J" comes to mind.

A DOS language named "C#" could only have been worse named were it called "C:"
Then there is Obol. All three. And whatever all is named "Rio". At least three.

The worst case for me is Curl which is doomed to be confounded with cURL. When a hairspray named "Surge" appears, the Curl RTE will have to be re-named.

Nemerle has sagely chosen an off-spelling.

"D" is not "E"

Self has suffered through LiveScript, JavaScript, ECMAScript and may be swallowed by ActionScript.

Even Prolog suffers with the 'prolog' in XML.

But Rebol. Rebol is as well-named as Perl.

That is not the case for Cecil with Vortex or any talk of Cecil and Diesel.

Smalltalk was ill-named. Self was worse. Slate, well, we'll see. Then there is StrongTalk and MetaTalk and BackTalk.

So we take datatype+value+word+block+context. Hmmm. A Rebol function could easily give us

dat-vardock-XT
dat-woluock-XT
dat-blordue-XT

Perhaps Rebol/command is in need of a new moniker. REBOL is not, imho.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There are worse than "J": I would propose "Beta" as in http://www.daimi.au.dk/~beta/ and "Adenine" as the name for the MIT Haystack scripting language.
But "gbeta" works fine. So what was wrong with "Simula-B" ? And then there is "Merd".