the python name

[rbowman]

On 01/02/2019 12:41 PM, Schachner, Joseph wrote:
> The name "Python" may not make sense, but what sense does the name Java make, or even C (unless you know that it was the successor to B), or Haskell or Pascal or even BASIC?  Or Caml or Kotlin or Scratch?  Or Oberon or R? Or Smalltalk, or SNOBOL?

BASIC is an acronym..

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf

Beginner's All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

It was Dartmouth University's didactic language for non-engineers and 
probably nobody imagined it would ever go anyplace. I went to an 
engineering school and learned FORTRAN in '65, the same time period, and 
never heard of BASIC until much later.

My wife went to a liberal arts college where they also had a didactic 
language that ran on CDC systems. I can't remember the name of the 
language but both it and CDC are dusty footnotes now,

SNOBOL was sort of a tortured acronym, StriNg Oriented symBOlic 
Language. I don't know if that was a play on COmmon Business Oriented 
Language.

FORTRAN came from FORmula TRANslation.  My favorite is a weird little 
language mainly useful for matrix operations that IBM modestly named APL 
- A Programming Language. Of course they also had PL/I, Programming 
Language One.