One-letter programming languages

[riffraff]

first thing I noticed: missing E! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(programming_language)

[sndean]

Looks like [1] the only letters not yet taken are: H, I, N, O, U, V, W, Y, and Z? Changes depending on whether you're allowing characters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

[88e282102ae2e5b]

I really wish modern language creators would take googleability into account when naming their languages. Even with rust, I occasionally have to use "rustlang" to avoid result pages with mostly plumbing sites, I imagine the situation is far worse for D, F and M.

[Razengan]

Does anyone remember what that was like when the .NET framework first came out? It's literally just a TLD..

[dgemm]

And Google itself named a language "go".

[zem]

the worst language i've seen for that was "clean" - it's so generic a term that even other programming languages use it to describe themselves!

[WalterBright]

Use "D language" and it googles no problem.

[thiht]

As you say, use "rustlang". The same works for golang, dlang, nimlang, and probably a few others.

But I agree Googlability is a problem. C# or F# are really hard to google for example. It's hard with C too since clang refers to something else

[Buttons840]

Rust also clashes with a video game named Rust. I tried to check the Rust Reddit yesterday but ended up at the video game Reddit. Fortunately, the game will soon fall into obscurity while Rust lang grows in popularity.

[Maken]

Whenever I try to search for graphic programing related issues with Rust, there is a game with the same title that fills up the result pages.

[Zardoz84]

For "D" you should search "Dlang"

[k__]

"a manager counted the lines of software coming out of the cubicle farm and determined that programmers wrote N lines of code a day. It didn't make a difference what language was used -- the company would get only N lines out of them. The manager promptly embraced APL, the tersest, most powerful language around"

They can only do N lines, so the natural decision was to use terser languages, I love it.

I mean, yes there are reasons to use a special language for a problem (for example Elixir instead of Ruby, for distributed systems). Also sometimes some problems get solved more elegant in newer languages (Rust instead of C++ for system programming).

But if the only metric is lines of code, every language solves this with enough abstraction layers...

[eru]

Just the opposite. If you figure out the number of lines of code is constant, like the alleged manager, you can start taking it as a constraint and optimizing for other things.

[humanrebar]

It's odd that F# is covered, but not C#, Objective-C, or especially C++. It was especially odd to read the description of D without C++ being named. The inclusion of RAII in D is a dead giveaway of its inspiration.

[aap_]

The author also didn't get the history of C right. 1. it wasn't Dennis and Brian who wrote UNIX but Ken and Dennis. 2. B wasn't an internal language of AT&T but a language designed by Ken. 3. 16-bit words weren't immense at the time...yes, the PDP-11 had addressable bytes (unlike any other PDP) but I don't understand what this had to do with 16-bit words being "immense". 4. It was only Dennis not Dennis and Brian who developed B into C.

[ben-schaaf]

To add to that point. The following quote is from an old version of dlang.org[1]

> Can the power and capability of C++ be extracted, redesigned, and recast into a language that is simple, orthogonal, and practical? Can it all be put into a package that is easy for compiler writers to correctly implement, and which enables compilers to efficiently generate aggressively optimized code?

Although this has slightly differed now, one of D's core objectives was to make a better C++ from the ground up.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20120111102019/http://dlang.org/o...

[tux]

C# = 2 (letter + symbol), Objective-C = 11 (10 letters + 1 symbol), C++ = 3 (1 letter + 2 symbols) so its not odd :-)

[muricula]

The article mentioned C++ and Objective-C under the C language, and C# under F#. They may have done well to mention C++ and maybe Java's influence on D. They completely neglected E too.

[alva]

Missed out q!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(programming_language_from_K...

[fxn]

I am sorry, those are programming languages whose name has one letter.

For a true one-letter programming language please check SuperPython http://search.cpan.org/~mjd/SuperPython-0.91/SuperPython.pm.

[pvitz]

Btw. does anybody know what happened to kOS or z? I can't find anything on kparc.com anymore.

[wrp]

KxCon2016 is coming up May 19-22. Arthur Whitney is scheduled to give a presentation on K6. You might try asking on the Kdb+ Personal Developers Google group afterwards.

[justincormack]

I think they regretted saying anything about kOS early on, I think it won't be mentioned until release.

[mseepgood]

"Long ago, when Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, aka K&R, set out to write Unix".

Unix was created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie.

[stepvhen]

A little unfair that they write the K program out when finding primes smaller than a number is a J primitive.