I see, that's what I thought. No problem with naming languages after people, but it's easier if it's an homage to a certain person. Common first and last names alone often point to confusing people, and there might be a certain dissonance between the mental images ("I pulled some Julias pigtails in kindergarten, now I have her name on a CV?").
The same problem would probably arise if the last names would be more common, too. "Pascal" and "Turing are probably rare enough ('though "Pascal" was a bit in fashion as a boy's name in Germany when I was young).
What about "Ada", "Miranda" or "Haskell"? First names, too, albeit ones much less common these days. ("Linda" the language isn't even in that category, popularity-wise, although the source of the name seems to be a weirder story)
I don't see a strong pattern. There are others named after female first names that aren't particularly popular (most, really), though the set of popular languages is small enough that it's not clear there's enough data to draw any conclusions.
This was also my immediate thought. Naming is hard. Globally unique names that actually convey something about what you do, are recognizable, and sound pleasant to speakers of most languages seems even harder.
I think that even an arbitrary name (e.g. quark colors blue, green, red) is easier to digest/process/memorize over a person’s name that may be from a language you are not familiar with. However that also points to another problem. How do you translate? Do you force the word from the discover’s language on all other languages or do you translate it? If you translate then you are introducing drift but if you don’t translate then the word is just as effective as a foreign name. It’s almost like you would have to come up with a table for the concept in all common languages. So while names suck I don’t know what would be better.
Contrary to the many other "falsehoods programmers believe" articles, this has a strong caveat about domain restrictions.
(What I'm saying is probably an instance of #29, "Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.")
E.g. if I'm writing tax software for a particular country, it is plausible to rely on an assumption that people have exactly one canonical full name (#1) in a specific format of names (#5) written in a specific character set (#10), because the names have to match a particular single source of truth (gov't registry), and the criteria for names in that registry is mandated by law. Yes, people coming from other countries (#24,25,26,27) may have different naming schemes, however, the same law prescribes how the names of the different languages shall be mangled to fit in the single commonly accepted standard, and that (mangled) version is legally mandated as de facto canonical name in all the related systems. That does come with the caveat of #38 "Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person" and #2 "People have exactly one full name which they go by" as that person may use some other name in common life and other documents.
So my point is that names are essentially an arbitrary social/legal construct that can be (and often are!) made to fit arbitrary restrictions.
I'm a french speaker, Jolie is a common woman name, yes it also means pretty, but that's like people called Lily or Prince. The logo is also a woman's eye + brow.
It's possible the author was going for the meaning of pretty, but there still seem to be a strong personification happening with emphasis on it being a beautiful woman, and it's that aspect that unease me.
Again, you can call your language however you choose too, and I'm not going to judge it by its name, but I still personally find this womanization trend in programming language names a bit weird.
I'll probably get used to it, though it does feel like an interesting meta-psycholigical subject as well. Where are the programming languages named John, Richard and David? Why are we calling a language by a person's name? Why are their logo becoming human facial features?
One does not agree or disagree with naming conventions, one merely comes from a place that has one. Everything would be a lot simpler if theres just a single Name field accepting any Unicode string in forms across the globe. The goal should be to describe a person, not to propagate local naming conventions.
That's an interesting thing. However, it would me more interesting (and usable, for example, in gamedev) if each name would also contain a reference to, for example, top-3 countries/cultures in which the name is popular.
I wish there was a similar list: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Human Names.
Billions of people don't follow GivenName SurName format that is common in the Western English culture. Yet most places online believe this to be true.
I really meant within the right context, which would be western folks in tech talking about notable people in the industry, and likely have mentioned Google at some point in the conversation. Sergey isn't a common name among the notable in western tech.
Elon is even more unique of a name to western ears, so I was just pointing out that another (yet less unique) name also gets the first-name treatment.
For more examples, I'd say Satya Nadella also gets 50/50 first/last name treatment in casual conversation.
Same for French names. Last names are okay, but first names aren't French at all for most of them.
I think maybe you had a list of all possible names, but you didn't take into account that some of them are more frequent than others ?
One thing I've always wondered is how much if any awareness expats have of western last names. For instance, not to imply names matter, but the most famous person who shares my last name was a boxer. Great man, but he wasn't famous for being an Isaac Newton. So I'd hope no one would look at my name and think, oh she must be the kind of person who's really good at using her body rather than her brain. My experience with American culture is we only really focus on the positive aspects of names. Like if you're having a conversation with a Vanderbilt or a Rothschild it's hard to not notice that, but there's really not much awareness in terms of negative associations with names, since everyone deserves a shot, and since everyone's looking for their shot, it's the folks with prolific names who'd be more likely to conceal them.
This depends on your concept of how names work. Some people (often dependent on native language of those people) think names should be translated, but to me they're more like a token than other words.
If your name is Xinyi, your name in English is Xinyi, some people would disagree and say your name in English is Joy; whilst xinyi means joy (IIRC) that's not how names [should] work [IMO].
This might relate in part to how we use a lot of foreign language words for names in UK English. Like how Charis (biblical Greek) is a different name to Grace (modern English) but d both derive from the same meaning.
Last names in many places evolved from that same need to disambiguate between people though. Attach some marker of connection to a place (common in Finland, e.g. Joensuu meaning "mouth of river"), profession (common in Germany and UK, e.g. Müller, Cooper, meaning mill worker and barrelmaker), lineage (common in Iceland, e.g. Grímsson meaning "son of Grímur"), or some other culturally relevant characteristic.
Nowadays the meanings of our last names have largely disappeared, so you have countless Coopers who have never touched a barrel in their lives, whose children will be called Cooper also, despite that. I think it's a little sad that so much of what people call us is semantically equivalent to a random UUID with tons of namespace collision. With that in mind, I'd say "da Vinci" is more a last name than most of us have.
Words of different languages are often suggested for a ban, but fail the real-world test.
Countless languages borrow words from one another, especially names. For example, some people argue that calling Marie Sklodowska-Curie simply Curie misrepresents her character naïvely, as her name and country of birth were important to her. You could, of course, latinize it, but that gets you into trouble with the Turks and the Koreans and essentially all languages that had writing before the industrial age.
The same problem would probably arise if the last names would be more common, too. "Pascal" and "Turing are probably rare enough ('though "Pascal" was a bit in fashion as a boy's name in Germany when I was young).
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