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Some historical language names that are also first names:

    * JOSS    - male   - 1966
    * Pascal  - male   - 1970
    * Ada     - female - 1983
    * Perl    - both   - 1988
    * Haskell - male   - 1990
    * Lua     - female - 1993
    * Ruby    - female - 1995
    * Delphi  - female - 1995
    * Julia   - female - 2011
Honorable mention: Erlang is a (male) god in Chinese Buddhism.

Some caveats apply. Many language names are also surnames, I leave that to future work.

See also: Beryllium



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Lua means 'Moon' in Portuguese

I remember a HN post where someone talked about naming their daughter Lua. They liked the name when they first heard it, and being a programming language was just a nerdy bonus.

Telling their wife that it means 'moon' in Portuguese made it an easy sell.


Joss: can be either male or female, as a nickname for Joseph or Jocelyn (think: Joss Whedon, Joss Stone)

Perl: doesn't strike me as a name at all, and the language name definitely wasn't referencing it (more likely a reference to the shell).

Lua: doesn't strike me as a name either, and the language was named for the moon.

Ruby: is a girl's name, but the language was named for the precious stone.

Delphi: is the name of a city, though it does reference the (female) Oracle of Delphi (the language was designed to make Oracle databases accessible).


My criterion for the list was whether or not I could find a well-known person with the given word as their birth name.

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